Marvel's Daredevil: A World in Flames
by Caudimordax
Summary: Only 48 hours after Wilson Fisk is imprisoned, Hell's Kitchen brings even more terrifying and sinister evils to bear upon the unsuspecting borough of Manhattan. As the Kingpin struggles to escape from Rikers Island Prison fearing for his life, the streets of New York become a killing field, and Murdock's greatest fear is tested: that it takes a devil to kill a devil.
1. Chapter 1: An Eye for an Eye

**Preface & Acknowledgements  
**In eagerly awaiting the second season of Marvel's Daredevil, I found myself faced with an irresistible urge to pen to paper a haphazard series of thoughts and observations that, supplemented by a growing collection of graphic novels as well as encouraged by rumor of development choices shaping the much-anticipated second season, eventually manifested into my own vision of what events transpired between seasons 1 and seasons 2 of the TV series, Marvel's Daredevil. Out of respect to the writers of the TV series and its director, to whom I thank dearly for the very existence of both this work and my latest impetus to _write_ at all, I will attempt to keep the characters as faithful to the TV show as I believe possible within the framework of my ability as a writer, and hold to the established canon that has been revealed thus far. In the spirit of the show, several new characters will be introduced throughout the course of this ongoing series that are not present in the TV series, but that are characters in the Marvel Universe itself: _**Silvermane, Bullseye, The Rapier, Typhoid Mary,**_ and potentially guest feature characters from peripheral Marvel movies and television. OCs will generally be kept at a bare minimum, and will serve only to advance major elements of the plot. I would also like to thank the soundboard for my ideas, epiphanies and revelations as well as my steadfast critic and sufferer of the dreaded rough draft, fellow Fanfiction author Henta1Rampag3, whose work I recommend highly to admirers of professional-level fanfiction.

* * *

 **EPISODE I**

 _ **AN EYE FOR AN EYE**_

 ** _By Caudimordax_**

With sight beyond sight, Matt Murdock _gazed_ upon the city he'd shed so much blood for. Long after the Kingpin's fires had gone out, the world was still aglow with the crimson embers of evolving purpose for the Daredevil. His heightened abilities intuited the neighborhood's lattice of overcrowded streets by painting a mental image built from an accumulated library of distinct sounds along with perceivable variations in smell, taste, pressure, balance and direction. In so doing, he could sense each and every one of them—the sons and daughters of Hell's Kitchen. Fathers. Mothers. Husbands. Wives. Girlfriends. Boyfriends. The children at play on the front stoops of the tenement slums. The dope slinger operating just outside the entrance to the IRT Flushing Line at 34th and Hudson Yards. The agitated day trader flipping stocks over a Bluetooth headset while he impatiently roosted in queue at Johnny Panini's for his daily intake of prosciutto and mozzarella. These people and their stories, their dreams and their nightmares, their confessions and their secrets, comprised the divergent thrum of Hell's Kitchen. It was a throbbing and erratic pulse so absorbed with its own cacophonous nature less than 48 hours after the arrest and incarceration of one of Manhattan's most murderous psychopaths, it was already back to _business as usual_. Murdock began to feel his blood boil as it slowly dawned on him that to the very people he'd sworn to protect, the recent wave of crime and death that left much of their community in ruins warranted a level of outrage equivalent to losing cellular service in a tunnel. A multinational turf war was reduced to a byline in the Bulletin. Just another piece of Kitchen history grossly misrepresented on the evening news by some corporate shill reporter to her viewership, the glib cabbie to his fare, the politically-sensitive art student to anybody on the subway that would listen. But as Wilson Fisk's accounts dried up and his connections ran to ground, the people of Hell's Kitchen would simply _forget_ this man and all the ill he'd done them. For whether out of fear, ignorance or simply indifference, nobody wanted to face the reality of the situation. No one was enraged by the terrible ordeal this city and its villains had put them through. Not a soul would thank the Devil of Hell's Kitchen for putting a stop to it. Hatred, Murdock had begun to discover, along with an unflinching desire for payback, were the only truly galvanizing emotions. And yet, even after all the carnage and chaos the Kingpin left in his wake, the rage and grief Matt so ardently believed was the commonality he shared with these people were absent. And this the devil within Murdock could not abide.

Long before he'd reached the door to the rooftop of the building where Nelson & Murdock's righteously-shoestring legal enterprise operated, Matt could discern the distinct timbre of Foggy's well-worn Italian leather wingtip dress shoes squeaking up the tiled staircase, his ragged breathing and erratic heartbeat indicative of something urgent or distressing. By the time the Daredevil's closest confidant had reached the top of the stairwell, Nelson required a moment to regain his composure—and his breath—before throwing open the rusty old door to the roar of the urban jungle each of them called home. Foggy didn't bother announcing his presence; after the recent revelation that his _blind_ best friend _saw_ the world with a degree of clarity and precision he'd never know himself, Nelson had angrily abandoned most of the pretenses he'd spent almost a decade affording his legal comrade out of respect and a selfless desire to share the world of lines, shapes, colors and beautiful girls with him. Perhaps one of the things that angered him most—beyond the obvious betrayal and breach of trust, of course—was the feeling of uselessness he found himself completely unable to shake. Before he'd learned the truth, Matt had always been the devilishly handsome of the two, confident, determined, impossibly educated and inextricably perceptive. But he'd been _blind_. And Foggy had always been there to take his arm in his own and lead him around, over and through the dangerous metropolitan geometry that might present the average sightless resident with an exhausting menu of daily challenges. But he now knew that not only could Matt negotiate a crosswalk during rush hour traffic, but he could defend himself against _armed_ thugs and criminals. He could effortlessly deduce which women were goddesses and which were goats. He had graduated with the highest honors possible from Columbia Law. He spoke multiple languages. He dressed well. And everyone could not help but love him. The gravitational pull of Murdock's social kung-fu was inescapable. So where did that leave Foggy? Was his destiny simply to play the role of the awkward, quirky, second-best and overly-judicious sidekick? His resentment was barely masked as he came astride his best friend.

"You weren't planning on stylishly leaping off the edge to go fight crime under cover of darkness were you, because I probably wouldn't be able to stop you," Foggy grunted miserably.

"I wouldn't ask you to," Matt replied softly, sadly.

Nelson's brow furrowed as he wiped his mouth on his jacket sleeve. "Jesus, Matt! You know, in the past couple of days I've been so pissed off at you, but it was punctuated by moments of clarity where I imagined a world in which I could forgive you for everything you've done."

"Foggy…"

"No, Matt, listen. And I know you listen better than most people, so listen good. I thought about a world where I could forgive you, because in that world you were a good person that…Christ…somehow…in the end… _despite_ how unbelievably led astray you'd been…how far you'd lost your way…that you _cared_ about people. Genuinely cared about them. That everything you'd done…everything you would… _keep_ on doing…was because you cared about them." Nelson staggered a moment, but regained his balance.

"Foggy are you drunk?"

"Considerably. But I'm not finished yet." He belched loudly before continuing. "But Matt…you're just… _hell-bent_ on pushing _everybody_ away. You just…you can't ever really let people in, can you? My God, Matt, it's fucking unbelievable that you can see the world so clearly but be so goddamn blind to the most important thing in this shit life, and that's _each other_ , Matt. Because caring as much about somebody else as much as you care about yourself reminds us of why it's so special to be human. Matt…what…what are you fighting for if not to allow these relationships to flourish? And when you care about somebody that much, Matt…" His lower lip trembled and his eyes misted as he spoke. "…when you care about somebody that much Matt, you darn well better try to stop them from jumping off roofs."

"I'm sorry, Foggy," Matt said. "I really am. I've said it more than a dozen times and I can't… I don't know how many more I'll have to say before you believe me."

"I don't want you to say you're sorry," the other groaned.

"Then what _do_ you want?" Murdock countered with a sigh.

"I _want_ you to trust me."

"I do trust you, Nelson."

"Make me believe that, Matt. Make me _understand_ why, night after night, you forsake the people who love and care about you by dressing up like some whack-job cosplayer and putting your life… _your life_ , Matt…at risk in order to…what…give the beating of a lifetime to some hotshot criminals?"

"Fisk is behind bars, isn't he?"

"Yeah, and so what, Matt?" Foggy spread his arms wide. "Look around you! Has _anything_ … _anything at all_ …gotten _any_ better around here since you dispensed your street justice on the Kingpin and delivered him to the police?"

Matt was silent, but his jaw squared and tensed.

"Have the crackheads stopped dealing?" Foggy went on. "Have Landman and Zach stopped defending scumbags? Have the police stopped taking payoffs? Have the newspapers printed sensational stories about how much the glorious and renewed community of Hell's Kitchen is poised to flourish and rise from the ashes of corruption and iniquity? In fact…has a single person in those streets below I know you're listening to deviated even slightly from their normal bullshit lives because of what you've done?"

Murdock heaved with audible regret and frustration. He removed his sunglasses, folded them, and replaced them in his vest pocket. He stared Nelson straight where he estimated his eyes should be. "What do you want me to do, Foggy?"

"You see, Matt, nothing's changed because all you've done is use crime to stop crime. And if all people see is a never-ending chain of crime, then they can't have hope. Because not everybody can be like you, Matt Murdock. Not everybody's strong, and quick, and fucking badass at mixed martial arts. Most people are just…boring or fat or slow or…God…worse still, _mundane._ And what you've done here, Matt…it's something that's just…comic book stuff. Normal people…people like me…we can't just leap off buildings and sprint off into the night and take down the bad guys with...batons, or whatever those things you fight with are."

"They're called _eskrima sticks_ ," Murdock pointed out clinically but without condescension in his voice.

"Whatever," the other scowled. "Matt, my point is…people need hope. And to give them hope, well, you've got to give them _faith_. Faith in the system. Faith in the idea that no matter how rich and powerful and well-connected guys like Fisk become, they're not immune to or above the law. And that lawyers like you and me…like Nelson and Murdock…will fight them but not in a Russian chop shop, Matt, but in a _real_ arena—the court of law. They need to see that these scumbags cannot and will not get away with exploiting them and robbing them and raping them and killing them because _we will hold them accountable_. And if they are not judged in the eyes of God, well, they'll be judged in the eyes of twelve jurors, a judge, a bailiff, and a room full of lawyers. And it… it _has_ to begin there because if civilized society lacks the means to defend itself against evil, well, then, Matt, we're already lost and we're no better than the guys you beat up on night after night."

Matt was quiet for some time as he internalized what his best friend said to him. Ultimately, he knew Foggy was right. That's why he'd gone to law school in the first place, and he'd left Landman and Zach to start his own firm with Foggy—to build community through a belief in the legal system and due process. But his own faith in the law had been tested, time and time again (he thought of the father that molested his own daughter), mocked by others (Stick, who ridiculed his "naïve crush on the America's most famous prostitute: Lady Liberty"), and eventually shattered by his own hand. Nelson was right; he had lost his way. But there had been moments—like when he'd defended Karen Page; like when he'd defended John Healy—that he felt like he'd used a more exquisite and satisfying form of kung-fu to masterful effect: the truly ancient art of _speaking_. Argumentation. Logic, rhetoric and persuasion. At these, he was peerless, and with these gifts he was truly deadly in a courtroom. Even without calling upon his enhanced hearing and other secret talents, when he set his mind to winning over a jury, every speech he'd ever given was a tour de force of gutsy legal seduction. His skills were feared by virtually every intern on the L &Z roster. And whether a defense attorney or a prosecutor, he was a force to be reckoned with. Why had he lost sight of that? How had his festering cynicism gone unnoticed for so long?

Even though Murdock could not actually _see_ his best friend, he could not bear to look at him as he admitted, "If you ask for the truth, you might not like what you're going to hear."

"I don't care. You owe me this."

Matt sighed heavily. "Foggy…the truth is…I…I _like_ hurting people… I… I just don't think it's _enough_ for these people…after everything they've done…to just… sit in some prison somewhere in some big, spacious, comfortable cell with all the privileges they can afford because they've paid off the guards and the warden or…hell…threatened their friends or their families. Foggy…these people _ruin_ lives… they _take_ lives. Indiscriminately. Like they're nothing. They deal with people like they're…" He shuddered visibly. "Like they're goddamn currency. Commodities trading on the stock market uptown. And they…they… _need_ to know the actual _feeling_ of suffering. They need to know what pain feels like, because to these people…it's…it's an abstract concept they laugh about over champagne at fundraiser dinners."

"And I suppose _you_ are the person that gets to decide who should feel pain and how much, am I right?"

"Well somebody has to."

"Why you?"

"Because…"

"Because what? _What_ , Matt?"

At length, the Devil of Hell's Kitchen replied, "You remember the story I told you about the little girl whose father was raping her? And what I did to him afterwards?"

Nelson recoiled visibly in his drunkenness, but managed to nod.

"What I never told you before was that when I beat that man to within an inch of his life, he spent the next few months in the hospital eating through a straw. And the thing was, for those next few months…I'd never slept so soundly in my entire life. You see, Foggy, I have to do this because…I'm not a good person. And I've…I've hurt... _a lot…_ of people. You…Karen…Claire… Hurting people is what I do, Nelson. And…I've gotten really… _really…_ good at it. I am simply what I am—an instrument of justice. Finely tuned to bring evil men to justice. One thing I've learned growing up in this city is that sometimes you need a wolf to kill a wolf. Do you see any other wolves around the neighborhood?"

Nelson stared at Murdock with a look of crushing, annihilating sadness and pity. "If I could spell it out for you in braille, Matt, I would, because you just can't see it. You're a brilliant lawyer. You're a man of conviction, belief, integrity. But you're using your gifts all wrong, and it's going to be the death of you if you don't stop."

"Nobody lives forever," Matt conceded.

"If you're so eager to die, why did you bother with Columbia or Landman and Zach or Nelson & Murdock at all? Huh? Why?" Foggy's anger was contorting his words into blubbering phrases and raspy utterances.

"I… I don't know," Murdock said truthfully. "Maybe because there's a devil and an angel inside of me, and the angel just isn't ready to die yet. Who knows? Maybe I just feel like I can do even more good if I attack the problems of this city from both sides of the equation."

"Eventually, you're going to have to pick a side."

"Eventually," Matt stressed the operative word in his friend's observation.

Foggy spat off the ledge of the rooftop. "I need another drink. I'm starting to sober up."

"I think you should call it quits for the night. Has Karen closed up the office yet?"

"She went home early. She's been calling it quits earlier and earlier the last few nights. Hasn't really spoken that much either, actually, but I mean, can't say I blame her. Things have been freakin' tense around here." He thought a moment. "Hey, why'd you even have to ask me that? Couldn't you just tell if she was still in the building by listening for her heartbeat or smelling her perfume or something?"

Matt smiled softly. "I was…I could have…but what else are friends for?"

The two were silent again for some time before the conversation picked up again.

"So…you're not going to stop…are you?"

"There's nobody to fight momentarily."

"Matt…there's _always_ gonna be somebody to fight. You know that. I know that."

"Well…whenever they decide to make their debut…I'll be right here. _Listening._ "

"Is Nelson & Murdock still opening its doors to new clients or are we totally caput?"

"Well I can't pay the electric bill by dressing up in a little horned suit and getting into fights in condemned industrial locales, so let's not throw out our legal dictionaries just yet."

"Fair enough," Foggy sniffled, wiping his eyes on his sleeve. "We need to talk things over with Karen though. We've got to get some kind of system going that we all adhere to. All this secret-keeping has to stop, Matt. I'm putting my foot down on this one, even if you can still kick my ass."

Matt chuckled airily. "No disagreement there. Send her a message. Tell her we'll meet tomorrow morning for coffee someplace. The three of us."

"I'll set it up."

"Good. Thanks. And tell her I'm sorry."

"Anything more specific?"

Matt thought a moment. "Just tell her I'm sorry. I'll figure out how to explain everything to her when I've worked it all out myself in my own head."

"Fine, Matt, but don't take forever. I feel, somehow, like she's drifting away from us. I mean, yeah, it's been stressful lately, but I also feel like there's something else going on. Something she hasn't told us."

Matt nodded and cleared his throat. "I know. I noticed it too. She's been trying _really_ hard to hide it…but…something's happened. I'm not sure what."

"So…I mean… can you just like…read her mind or something?"

Murdock gave a singular but genuine laugh. "Hah! Now you're confusing me with the guy running that institute for special kids or whatever out in the burbs to the northeast."

"Yeah, well, who knows what other surprises about you I still have to unearth?"

"Honestly, Foggy, there's nothing more to tell. You know everything there is to know."

Except it wasn't _exactly_ everything. As Matt returned the focus of his senses to the streets below, he dwelled on the notion that he feared most: that without crime and chaos in the world, he had no purpose. He _needed_ evil to exist or else he lost his own identity. He hadn't donned the mask and become the man in the mask because the city had asked him to. Hell's Kitchen was simply that— _Hell—_ and it was simply a devil's lot to live in it. Wilson Fisk and his associates hadn't created the Daredevil; he'd already taken up residence in Murdock's soul long before that. Only lately had the son of a bitch begun once again to charge him rent.

* * *

"Prisoner number 1976131 stand your fat ass up, spread your legs, and place your hands against the wall," the prison guard shouted over the vulgar cacophony of C-Block.

For several moments, the prisoner sat motionless, seated on the edge of his cot, staring blankly at the wall before him. Then he turned to face the guard and fixed eyes upon him. They were coal-black, opalescent orbs that seemed at all times calculating and judging. But they were also cloudy and faraway. He stood slowly, a considerable effort for his large, weary frame.

"Your name," the prisoner said softly. "Your… _name_ …is Dwayne Jackson…isn't that right?"

The guard sneered and shuffled into the cell, conducted a thorough examination of the prisoner's person, checking for any manner of improvised weapons, shanks, or other contraband paraphernalia. Then, one by one, he maneuvered and cuffed the prisoner's enormous hands behind his back.

"Is this…is this really necessary, Mr. Jackson?" the prisoner grunted as he was restrained with a completely unnecessary amount of force. "I have complied, without violence or argument, to everything you've ever asked me to do. I am not the sort of man who would just… _brutalize_ a figure of authority such as yourself. I have demonstrated…to… _argh!_...to great effect that…that I do not mean you or your…or your colleagues ill. Do you…do you have to put me in cuffs like I'm some kind of… _criminal_?"

Dwayne Jackson gave a gruff laugh. "You _are_ a criminal, prisoner 1976131. You're a fucking murderer and a rich sleazebag and a profiteer on the misfortunes of the people of this city. You _are_ a criminal, Wilson, you _are_ the sort of man who would brutalize a prison guard, and you _are_ exactly where you belong. So yes, I am going to cuff you. And I don't give a rat's ass if you're Tony Fuckin' Stark, you're gonna get treated just like everybody else."

Dwayne Jackson gave the staunch frame of Wilson Fisk a brisk shove out of his cell and began to walk him down to C-Block intake and in the general direction of the interchange to the Quadrangle where the G-Pop, Processing & Visitor Wing, the medical facilities, and the recreational areas met at a central nexus.

"Where are you taking me, Jackson?" Fisk wondered. "It's not time for exercise. Breakfast was only one hundred and thirteen minutes ago. Now fourteen minutes. What's going on?"

"Shut the fuck up, Fisk," the guard remarked, annoyed. "You know damn well I ain't supposed to say shit to you."

Wilson was lead through a series of hallways where prison security was tightest. This was due to his proximity to V&P (prison lingo for Visitors & Processing). The Kingpin shuffled as best he could, his balance poor due both to fatigue and the absurd pace the guard insisted he keep. Fisk could only speculate what sort of trouble was afoot, and he knew he'd get nothing out of the tight-lipped, surly Jackson.

"I'd like to use the lavatory," Wilson murmured, suddenly feeling an irrational sense of fear and dread brewing in his abdomen.

"Piss your pants," Dwayne said. "Ok face the wall beside the door and don't move a goddamn muscle."

The two came to a small but apparently secure door that had two prison guards posted outside of it. They were attired exactly like Jackson, but these guards possessed firearms whereas the C-Block guards were traditionally outfitted with standard-issue Tasers and Billy clubs. Fisk did as he was told, but eyed the two guards with heightened suspicion and unease.

"H…hey," he stammered. "Uh…excuse me…maybe you could tell me what I'm doing here. Why I've been yanked out of my cell with no explanation?"

Jackson nodded at the guard nearest him. "Percy, why don't you and Troy go take your smoke break early today. _And_ _take your time._ "

The armed guards exchanged glances, smiled and nodded toward one another.

"Yeah, sure," Percy replied before he and his cohort abandoned their posts and walked back down the hallway from whence the Kingpin and his escort had just came.

"Hey. Hey! Where are you going?" Wilson cried. "I…I demand to know what's going on here!"

Jackson waved his ID card over a scanner just to the left of the doorframe, then pressed his thumb down on the biometric scanner below it. His prints were scanned and approved by an on-site database presumably located beneath the Warden's office in a secured vault of reinforced concrete that could realistically survive most carpet bombings and bunker-busting missiles. The door opened.

"Inside," Dwayne ordered, grabbing Wilson's cuffed wrists and guiding him into the mysterious chamber.

"I don't want to go in there!" Fisk roared, struggling and trying to brace himself in the doorway. But Jackson himself wasn't a small man, and his sinewy arms and positional advantage saw him able to force his charge through the doorway and into the dark room.

When the door slammed shut and locked behind him, Fisk began to panic with a renewed level of terror. Though it had always been looming in the back of his mind, he'd known that he had countless adversaries who each wanted their pound of flesh for things the Kingpin had done to them—and in many cases their friends, families, and loved ones—and whether he was dead or alive didn't matter to a great number of them. And he knew that even in a six-by-eight foot cell in the bowels of Rikers Island prison, he could be got to. Fisk himself had been able to reach out, indeed on several occasions, to inmates in Rikers to _finish the job_ on inmates who had evaded his wrath on the outside. It would be easy for a man of influence and power to reach out themselves and see the Kingpin's last breath ripped from his body on the inside. He thought of Vanessa. His blood ran cold.

"Wilson," a familiar voice rasped with dark purport.

Fisk spun around and found himself staring at a nondescript, black table behind which sat a man he had not seen in many years. He was impeccably dressed to the nines in a pinstripe black suit and matching fedora hat. A gold and black ascot framed his collarbone, drawing attention to an angular, grizzled jawline and leathery, Mediterranean skin. His salt-and-pepper hair was long and tumbled about his shoulders with reckless abandon. A pair of frost-blue eyes remained fixed upon Fisk's now paralyzed figure. From his left breast pocket he procured an ornate, golden case of about the size and thickness of a cassette tape, opened it, and removed a black and gold-ringed MS brand cigarette. He then fished a zippo lighter out of his trouser pocket then set the cigarette ablaze. The man inhaled deeply, purposefully, then exhaled, filling the room with a listless haze.

"Would you care for a cigarette, Wilson?" the man asked politely.

The Kingpin regarded the other carefully. "I don't smoke anymore."

"And as a result, Wilson, you've put on considerable weight since we last met. The city you stole from me…the city that you… _evicted_ …me from…has made you bloated and amoebic. Look at you. You've become one of the very spoiled, self-entitled fat cats you used to despise."

"Are you here to kill me?" Fisk asked darkly.

"Sit down, Wilson," the other replied cooly. The Kingpin complied, slowly and mechanically, for there was little choice. He took the chair opposite his guest. "Although it would admittedly delight me considerably for your death to be by my own hand—we (he hit the cigarette) have a sort of (then exhaled) saying in Italy… _occhio per occhio, dente per dente…_ in English, this is like saying, 'An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth'…but, ah, I'm sure you get the meaning—it would not be pragmatic or beneficial to do so here and now in this very room. At least not just yet."

"Then _what_ do you want?" the Kingpin grumbled. "Are you…are you here to…to gloat…to boast that I'm…" he gestured around himself, "…in here…and you're out there to do…whatever it is that you do these days. There's nothing you can say that I don't already know. Nothing you can do to me that won't make my life irreparably worse than it is."

The well-dressed gentleman took a long, luxurious puff of his cigarette. "Ah, but you see, _that_ is where you are terribly, terribly wrong, Wilson. You see, your problem was that you thought you could make the city work for you and your juvenile interests. Getting the Russians and the Chinese and the Japanese to work cooperatively in tandem…" he laughed and clapped his hands together in mock applause. "Impressive. Inventive, even. And that business with the councilman… Cherryh… some might even call that a political masterstroke. But you see, Wilson, you tried to take over this city…" The man stamped his cigarette out on the table, then rose from his chair. His ice-blue eyes gleamed in the wan light of the interrogation chamber. "I, Silvio Manfredi, _am_ this city, Wilson. And I have come here to tell you that there are going to be a lot of changes around here! Hell's Kitchen will be mine! The money will be mine! The drugs will be mine! And the people will be mine! Every. Last. One. Including that lovely arm-candy of yours…regrettably I've forgotten her name. I shall have to go acquaint myself with her more formally after I'm all settled in."

"If you…so much as _mention_ …her name…if y-y-you harm… _one single hair…_ on Vanessa's head…"

"You'll what, Wilson? _You'll what?_ " Manfredi taunted him. "Where are all your trusted minions and monsters now? Who do you think is going to get you out of here? It's _over_ , Fisk. Yesterday was _your time_. Today is _my time._ I just wanted, out of respect, to announce my intentions to you formally. It's how things were done in the old days. Back before people like you gave the _Maggia_ a bad name."

"I'll kill you," Fisk whispered. His hands trembled with barely-constrained rage and enmity. " _Every last one of you_."

"Perhaps," Manfredi smirked. "But not today, I think. Besides, someone has to mop up the mess you made after you ceased being useful and went off the reservation. People will be held accountable, most of all you, but everything has its time and place. And then there's the somewhat… _vexing issue_ …of this… _Daredevil_ person. What can you tell me about him?"

For the first time in years, Wilson Fisk felt all traces of fear and anxiety leave his body as though he had been exsanguinated by a supernatural force. There was only a cauldron of vengeance and vendetta boiling inside of him. If he could not be the instrument of his old rival's barbaric destruction, perhaps he could manipulate Manfredi into a confrontation with the Devil of Hell's Kitchen, a confrontation in which that insufferable cur of a vigilante would emerge victorious and rid his existence of this Italian menace one and for all. Fisk's lips curled into a hateful sneer.

"The devil you seek…is a man of singular drive and focus. He is unwavering, self-righteous, and motivated. He cannot be bought. Not with money. Not with fancy cars or lavish apartments or political appointments or affluent privilege. He is well-trained, well-armed, and if you cross him…hah… _when_ …you cross him…if he has not finished you off already, he will _find_ you. He will cause you insurmountable pain and and inconvenience, and you will underestimate him and throw subordinates at him until there is no one left to throw. And he will not stop until he gets to you, because when you go to war with the devil, he either comes home with his shield, or he comes home on it. I can promise you this—he… _thinks_ …the Kitchen is _his_ , and he _will_ fight you for it. And I hope…oh, Silvio, I truly, truly do hope…that you involve him with the _Maggia_ , because he will finish the job I started all those years ago…all those years ago when you were still as insignificant as you are now." The Kingpin laughed heartily. "This is not the city you remember it to be, Manfredi. I've kicked the hornets' nest, and all the wasps this city has in its hive are about to _buzz buzz buzz_ after whoever becomes the new beekeeper. All the worthy players are about to reveal themselves. Everybody wants a piece."

"Yes," Manfredi said, adjusting his ascot. "Yes they do. But this pie only has so many pieces. But you know who always gets a piece, Wilson? The baker. And this city… _my city_ …will pay whatever price I decide to sell the pie at. Or they will burn in the ovens of my enterprise. Guard!"

The door clicked as the biometric scanner was again activated. A moment later office Jackson entered the room.

"I wish you the very best of luck," Fisk said. "And remember what I said. If you even try to go _near_ Vanessa…"

"Oh, Wilson," Manfredi replied, clicking his tongue against gritted teeth. "Don't you fret. I don't plan on killing the future Madame Fisk unless you're there to watch me do it!"

"You bastard!" roared Kingpin, lunging forth at the other, but to no avail as Dwayne leapt to restrain him. "If you…if you go near her…kill you!" Fisk panted between ragged gasps.

"It was good to see you again, Wilson," the other nodded his head courteously.

As prisoner number 1976131 was dragged trembling and sweating back toward C-Block, he realized then and there he had to get out. He had to break free. For Vanessa's sake. Nothing else mattered. But he had no clue how. He had no connections or power he could exploit in his current position. Wesley was dead. And he was certainly next. In Rikers, somebody would get to him.

The Kingpin sat in his cell in silent deliberation for the next several hours, staring at the bleak, faded white wall across from his cot. The feeling of loneliness, isolation, and disconnection was like a radiant abyss that reflexively echoed his chaotic and cruel and impulsive nature. It was maddening. After a while, Fisk set to work tearing his pillowcase up into shredded strips and wrapped them round his gargantuan fists. With a measured tempo, he began to slam his fists into the wall of the cell. He thundered his clenched hands against the bleakness of the wall, taking chips of plaster and concrete out of the wall, dusting the floor with a chalk-like residue, the same residue that now covered his bleeding fists. "Kick him again," he kept repeating to himself with every punch. _Kick him again_!

Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony. That same day, Fisk would have a second visitor. A visitor that carried far better news than the first.

 _To be continued..._


	2. Chapter 2: First Blood

**First Blood**

 _By Caudimordax_

" _Righteousness acts never in its own interest, but in the interest of fellow men."_

— _Thaddeus of Vitovnica_

* * *

Karen Page clutched her handbag tightly against her chest as she walked briskly down the street to her apartment only three blocks away from the offices of Nelson & Murdock where she was currently employed. As her trembling hands groped instinctively at the handbag, she couldn't tell the feeling of which she coveted more: her mobile phone that had become the mainstay of her investigation and one-woman crusade against Fisk and his accomplices or the Ruger SP101 double-action revolver that she'd purchased less than twenty-four hours after the incident with the Kingpin's right hand, James Wesley. Feeling the familiar geometry of each through the leather and vinyl of her handbag comforted her somewhat, but she could never entirely shake the emotional malaise she'd been feeling ever since she'd gotten blood on her own hands. _She'd killed a man_. Yes, she had been in grave danger and had reason to fear for her own life. Still, she'd emptied an entire magazine into someone who had been in the middle of trying to reason with her. And she couldn't even remember doing it. It was happening again. Just like it did when she was younger. The blackouts. The violence. The death. A terrible phantasm from Karen Page's past had found her once again, and it would haunt her day and night with no resolution in sight. For this tribulation, Karen Page had a third item in her purse.

Once inside her dismal and sparsely-decorated flat, Karen dropped the handbag on her kitchen table and immediately removed the bottle of _Stolichnaya_ raspberry vodka and splashed an ample portion of the liquid into a liquor glass. Leaning against the refrigerator, she closed her eyes, took a long, deep swig of the vodka and grimaced as her esophagus burned with alcoholic inflammation. "Fuck," she whispered quietly, then again more loudly before emptying the glass with only a second gulp.

Karen sat for a long time on the couch in the living room area of her apartment. She did not turn on any lights. She stared at the Gaussian and amoebic reflection of herself in the old television against the wall by the window. Next she removed her heels, placed her feet upon the coffee table and, using her hands, flexed her sore toes for a while, listening to them snap, crackle and pop for a while. When her bones finally went mute, she poured herself a second drink. Then a third. Her cheeks began to feel warm and there was a mystifyingly anxious feeling in the pit of her stomach. She lay down on backward on the couch and rested one arm across her face, moaning pitifully as her mind roamed the dark and delirious corridors of her conscious. A buzzing sound emanated from her purse at one point, droning for half a minute. She ignored it until it stopped buzzing. After a while, she groped from her glass, but had forgotten where on the table she'd placed it. With a grunt, she pulled herself upright. Upon seeing the blue glow of her phone casting an eerie light from within the pit of her pocketbook, she fished it out and checked her missed messages. _Foggy Nelson._

She thought about Foggy. The couch she was sitting on right now had been sold to her at almost pennies on the dollar, in his own words, "a glorious, historic victory in the wondrous world of bargain shopping!" He'd apparently found it through Elena Cardenas, who in turn brokered the deal between several tenants of her building with whom she had enjoyed over two decades of familial friendship and cooperation. It was a horrid color, to be sure, and matched virtually nothing in her apartment, but Foggy had been so insistent and so proud of himself and his "bargain hunter prowess" that she'd taken it anyway. And after a while, it had started to grow on her. He had started to grow on her. They'd already been through so much together. Through the legal tenement battle, through the bombings and fires of Hell's Kitchen, and lately through whatever the hell was going on with him and his best friend in all the world, Matt. And she had been too stupid and too naïve to even recognize how much he'd actually cared for her—until it was too late. Now he was with Marci Stahl, and he lost a sense of trust with her, and she'd _killed_ someone. And she was _still_ unable to sort out the mess of feelings she felt about Matt. The mysterious, roguishly-handsome, disabled, sophisticated, intuitive and indescribably unsettling Matt Murdock. She loved them both as much as she hated herself. She poured herself a fourth glass to ensure intoxication. She didn't want to think about any of it anymore. The weight of the world was too much to bear.

* * *

Foggy cursed as Karen's phone switched over to voice mail. He'd made her promise that, at least for the moment, she'd answer her mobile night or day. Even with Fisk behind bars, the streets themselves were not safe. Nelson had seen enough crime drama, read enough comic books and graphic novels to know that whenever a void of power presented itself, it was the natural order of the universe to attempt to fill it however possible and no matter the cost. It was one of the few certainties of life. _I'll go see her,_ he decided. _I'll check up on her. Make sure she's answering her phone. Tell her in person about the meeting tomorrow. Apologize for Matt. Nothing big. Nothing involved. Just...straight to business, Foggy. Lay down the law, say what you gotta say, get out, go home, get some sleep. Deal with Matt tomorrow._ With a resolute nod, he turned the corner and headed down the street at a swift pace.

Twenty-two minutes to the second later, Foggy found himself in front of Karen's 'new' apartment designation. It was, at least, a slightly better neighborhood than where the law offices were. There was a corner store only a block away, and there was even a community garden in the back of the apartment building. And, as he'd pointed out to her at an earlier date, only three blocks south and one block east there was the best goddamn vintage records store in all of Hell's Kitchen. What more could a denizen of New York's unsavory underbelly ask for?

Nelson stood in front of Karen's apartment door for a minute. He fixed his collar and adjusted his tie, licked his palms and slicked back his hair as best he could. Its length and straw-like texture reminded him he was grossly overdue for a trim. Then he knocked. And knocked again. And again. It wasn't until the fourth and loudest knock that he heard a muffled voice followed by a calamitous shuffle from within.

"Karen?"

"Yeah, I'm coming…just…just a sec!"

"Karen, it's me, Foggy. You alright in there?" he kept knocking.

There was a fumbled unlatching of interior locking mechanisms followed by an overly-zealous opening of the apartment door. Karen staggered backward slightly and Foggy lunged forward, grabbed her arm at the wrist and steadied her.

"H…hey…Foggy!" Karen giggled.

"Karen, I…have…have you been drinking?"

"Um…oh…no? Yes? Maybe a little?"

Foggy pushed his way inside and Karen drunkenly closed the door behind him. "Suuuuure, come _riiiiight_ in," she slurred.

The lawyer stared at the ugly yellow-green couch in the center of the living room with a crooked smile on his face. "Jesus," he whispered. "That thing really is _hideous._ "

"H-hey, Foggy, whaddya doing here?" Karen asked, nervously moving to the couch, grabbing the vodka off the table, putting it quickly in her handbag, then clutching the bag to her chest.

Nelson stared at her incredulously, baffled by her behavior. "I'm checking up on you."

"I'm fine."

"You didn't answer your phone."

"Yeah…well…I'm a big girl…aaaaand you're not my father."

Foggy bristled visibly. "We talked about this…"

"Look, Foggy, OK, I know I should have picked up the phone," she sighed exasperatedly. She simply wanted the conversation to end so she could get back to drinking. "I'll answer next time. Was there anything else you needed, or…"

"Yes, there was. I wanted to talk…"

"CHRIST, Foggy… ugh… OK, what? What do you…what do you want to talk about?"

As Foggy walked past the table, he picked up the empty glass and carried it with him to the window. He sniffed the empty glass and frowned, staring out the window of the apartment at the skyline of Hell's Kitchen beyond. Across the street, there was an elevated train behind which an old relic of a hotel from the 1910s or 1920s rose heavenward, its large, neon billboard still alight upon the rooftop with the giant water tower. The building had long ceased operations as a hotel, but had been broken up and sold piecemeal throughout the decades to various union offices, real estate firms, dry cleaners, credit collection firms and marketing agencies. Foggy watched an el-train glide silently by like a monster in the darkness of a moonless night.

"Karen, tomorrow Matt and I would like to have a talk with you. There's…a lot we have to tell you about. A lot that I'm still learning about myself. And… _fuck_ …it's going to shock you, and piss you off, and you probably won't even believe all of it. Hell, I didn't even believe it at first. But…I just…I really hate what's been happening to all of us lately… I've been really angry…but…but I want to fix it. So does Matt. We both do."

The strawberry blond apprentice at law rose unsteadily from the sofa and walked over to Foggy. She placed one hand on his back. "This…this is just really…a really h-hard time," she said, her voice trembling.

Foggy turned around to find Karen staring up at him, her eyes misty with tears. "Karen, I…"

She placed a finger upon his lips. "Shhhhh," she whispered, her voice husky with drink. "Let's… let's just forget all about that right now, Foggy," she smirked impishly. "I'm…I'm _incredibly_ drunk right now, and…and I really don't wanna think about any of this. I…I have a confession to make tomorrow…something that…something that's been eating away at me for a while…I did something bad, Foggy…something really… _really_ unforgiveable. And…and I…right now…I just…let's just not worry about that right now, OK?"

And she closed the distance between them with a single, surprisingly dexterous maneuver, and pressed her plump, vernal lips against Foggy's, hungrily slipping her tongue inside the other's mouth. Nelson's eyes nearly bulged out of his sockets, and his cheeks flushed crimson. Shock and amazement was quickly supplanted by disgust and self-loathing and frustration, and he shook her off of him. "No…no Karen, stop it… you're completely smashed. This isn't right! You don't know what, you're doing, I—"

"C'mon, let me do this," Karen said, trying to fumble with the buttons of his shirt. "You want this too…don't you?"

"Karen, no!" Foggy resisted every single urge and impulse in his entire body—wrestling with one of the most difficult decisions he'd ever had to make—and pushed her backward. Just in time for the empty liquor glass in Foggy's hand to explode into a million shards where Karen had only just one second ago been standing.

* * *

Eight hundred and sixty-two meters away from Karen's third-floor apartment, a single 7.62x51mm NATO round exited the barrel of a highly-modified Sniper Support Rifle Mk 20 Mod 0, travelled across two square blocks of rainy, congested, labyrinthine Manhattan gridlock, through the connection car of a moving el-train, and finally through a dusty apartment window only to end its journey by colliding extraneously with a liquor glass. By the time the man holding it had realized what happened, a second bullet had already been chambered and its deliverer was lining up his follow-up shot. He was completely ensconced in the shadows offered to him by the jagged recesses beneath the neon glowing sign of the former _Le Cabriolet Hotel_. His rifle was steadied upon the timber shelf created from an abandoned pigeon roost. There was a faint, neon glimmer from beneath his hooded face, right where his eyes should have been.

"Get down!" Foggy screamed, pushing Karen down to the floor behind the couch. She screamed with alarm, surprise and fear as she fell, but before Nelson could even attempt to shield her with his own body, a second bullet whirred through the window as if chasing the first, impacting at the lateral lip of the bicipital groove of his left arm, causing his entire frame to torque from the impact of the slug and slam noisily against the sofa before hitting the floor with a clamor.

* * *

Matt Murdock was seconds away from retiring for the evening. Perched atop the rooftop, listening, _observing_ the sounds of the world around him, he found Hell's Kitchen and its trials and tribulations were rather mundane and uneventful. Most petty crimes and inconveniences were promptly dealt with by actual law enforcement. A drunkard plowed into a fire hydrant somewhere on 65th. A woman was shouting angrily in a Dominican dialect at a husband who was apparently highly adept at pissing away large sums of money on scratch-off tickets. Nothing unusual. Nothing dangerous. Until, even from nearly five blocks away, Matt Murdock discerned the unmistakable _kchnkk_ of large-caliber rounds being propelled from military-grade ordinance. His entire body tingled with alertness and readiness almost instantly, exactly how he was trained to react. His ears strained, listened, felt. More shots. In the general neighborhood of Karen's apartment. Murdock didn't even waste another second, nor did he bother with taking the stairs. The Devil of Hell's Kitchen opted for the fire escape, for the duffel bag that was stashed in the dumpster at the bottom of it, and for the red costume within it that had begun to feel more like a second skin than a vigilante's alter ego. Daredevil was on the clock.

* * *

Once he could see clearly through the incredible amount of pain shooting through his upper arm, Foggy mentally cursed himself for overlooking the fact that Karen's new apartment was, much like Matt's place, primarily mostly windows to the west side. Consequently, the flat was a sniper's goddamn delight. The only positions that provided cover were the small island separating the kitchen from the living room, a three-foot hallway between the living room and the bedroom, and the bathroom beyond it. To any of these positions, it was at least a twenty-five foot dash at full clip. With his arm badly shredded and Karen drunk, neither of the pair were fit to do anything but sit tight behind the ugly, second-hand couch.

Maintaining cover, Foggy removed his jacket with a grunt then unfastened his tie and began to tie it around his left arm like a tourniquet. Karen began to sober up quickly.

"Oh my God, Foggy! You're bleeding! What the hell is happening?! Are you OK?"

"Someone… _aaaaaargh_ ….is fucking shooting at us, Karen!"

"Shooting at us?! From where?"

"I have no idea! Probably from across the street in some office or on top of a garage somewhere! I have no idea but _stay down_ and _don't move_!" He finished tying the knot in the tie, restricting blood flow to his arm so that he wouldn't bleed out.

"How'd you learn how to do that?" Karen whispered.

"Boy scouts. 7th grade."

"Are you serious?"

"I made eagle scout. Then I stopped going when the Sega Genesis came out. Hey, do you still have your mobile phone with you?"

"It's in my handbag."

"Where's your handbag?"

"On the table!"

"Fuck!" Foggy cursed.

"Well where's yours?"

"In my briefcase!"

"Where's the briefcase?"

"On the island in the kitchen!"

"Well then what are you cursing at me for?"

"I wasn't cursing _at you_! I was cursing _generally._ Dammit, Karen, _not really the time!_ "

"OK, you're right. Who are you trying to call? Matt?"

"Yeah. I gotta get to your handbag."

"You can't get up! You'll be shot!"

"I gotta try."

* * *

Through the telescoping lens of the sniper rifle, the man atop of the crumbling brick skeleton of La Cabriolet Hotel watched the events unfold like a ballet of death being performed underwater. His steel-blue eyes shimmered brightly as the geometry of the battlefield became intimately known to him. The distance between his rifle and his target. The speed of the wind, the angle of the falling rain relative to the geological slant of the isle of Manhattan, even the air pressure, dew point, temperature, light index and heat signatures of organic and inorganic entities. More than that, his enhancements conferred to him a series of directional probabilities of these entities taking weight, gravity, and other environmental factors into account and predicted algorithmically where a bullet needed to be dispatched to before the situation yet called for it. It was no wonder that when Foggy Nelson lunged for the coffee table, the slug from his sniper rifle was already there to meet him.

It wasn't a kill shot, to be sure. The dossier he'd been given hadn't even mentioned a man matching this one's description. The contract was for one individual and one only. _The woman_. And he didn't kill for free. Nor did he kill without reason. Well, not anymore anyway. But in his entire career as a world-class assassin, he had _never_ missed a mark. And he didn't intend to start now. If the man got in his way, he would put a bullet square in the center of the man's forehead. _Bullseye._

* * *

Foggy lay groaning on the floor of Karen's living room in a bloody mess. Another bullet had hit him in his flank, and a third just clipped his right ear. He dared not move from his position atop the wreckage of the coffee table in front of the sofa. He clutched his side and screamed at Karen making her promise not to try to make a move to help him. He reached inside Karen's handbag and discovered the Ruger SP101 first. Foggy brandished it in his good hand.

"When the hell did you get this?!"

"I…uh…a while ago. A girl needs protection if she's living in Hell's Kitchen, Foggy!"

"Jesus, Karen, do you even know how to shoot one of these?"

"Point and shoot, Foggy. Pretty self-explanatory, don't you think?"

Nelson scowled, then tossed the gun aside, reaching back into the purse and procuring the mobile phone. He pressed the power button, calling the screen to life. It had a pattern-style lock on it.

"A password?! Really?"

"Start at the bottom, make a diamond counterclockwise!"

Foggy did as directed. The phone unlocked, revealing a Spider Man wallpaper eclipsed by several application shortcuts. Nelson scrolled the list of contacts and found Matt's number. He hit the dial button just before the phone exploded into an unrecognizable spatter of plastic and silicone.

* * *

Matt was one block away from Karen's place when he heard the shots again. Murdock had a feeling of pure dread propelling him forward as he couldn't help but feel that Karen was in grave danger. He glided through the shadows, a red blur as he moved from street lamp to street lamp, his head held high as he strained to find the direction of the shots. Fortunately, he was downwind of the sniper, and he could tell that the shooter was in a lofty perch, looking down in the direction of the building where Karen lived. He came at length to the four cornered intersection and craned his neck upward, silently listening. The rain fell about him in slow motion. Cars rolled by noiselessly. A Rottweiler barked close by, but Murdock barely heard it. His ears sought only one sound on the night air: the bone-chilling _whoosh_ of high-velocity rounds arcing through the air. He heard it again, just barely. The weapon was well-muffled, and the vantage point audibly discreet. But the Daredevil was no amateur. He had spent his entire life listening for things others would forever be deaf to. This was no exception. The shooter was atop the roof of the old renovated hotel building. Matt raced toward it as if lives depended upon it. And they did.

* * *

The shooter entrenched on the roof of _La Cabriolet Hotel_ was beginning to grow impatient. He questioned whether he'd grown rusty in his brief but listless retirement down in Panama. Granted, the contract had been a rush job and marketed as a personal favor to a very powerful man, but there was no reason, even under these poor conditions, that he shouldn't have been able to eliminate his mark. Hell, he was almost sure the woman was drunk to boot. But then the nameless man had shown up and complicated things. He thought about breaking his rule and just eliminating the problem altogether. It wasn't a sense of moral rectitude that stopped him; it was two things, and two alone. The first was pride. He considered himself to be among the top three shooters in the world today. He held both the record for the second longest confirmed kill in the world and the record for the most targets eliminated in a single military tour. His skills were legend, feared among some. And that led to the second reason: greed. Skill as good as his didn't come cheap. You had to pay good money to get a killer of his caliber to sit on top of a roof in the freezing rain in the biggest cesspool of a city on the East Coast and wait for a mostly-innocent woman to get home, drink a little, then "headshot & chill", as he often sneered with acerbic cynicism. He used to like gigs like this, back in the day, these exhilarating target stakeouts with huge payoffs and the inevitable "disappear out of the country like a ghost" routines. Now, this was getting tiring, irksome, and was taking entirely too damn long. And something felt wrong. Terribly wrong. And he didn't know what it was until he heard the door to the rooftop smash open.

Daredevil dashed out onto the roof, eskrima drawn and poised at the ready, focused on the heartbeat and breathing of the assassin he was tracking. As soon as he burst out into the rain, the sound of both was immediately lost to him. He proceeded with extreme caution, watching his audiographic view of the world manifest as a sea of liquid fire and murky shadows. Nowhere among his sightless canvass of the world was the would-be killer present. He smelled the smoke and polish of the sniper rifle and gazed upward to where the gun still remained lodged in the shadowy recesses beneath the neon hotel sign from inside the empty pigeon coop. He barely heard it when the safety of a Glock 19 machine pistol with laser sights and a hair-trigger modification clicked nearly noiselessly from just ten feet behind him.

Murdock spun on his heel immediately and snapped his right arm at the elbow, hurtling one of his combat batons directly at the mysterious gunman shortly before launching his lithe body into a rotating aerial which limited the body mass he would present as a target to the fullest extent possible as he closed the distance between himself and his enemy. The assassin ducked out of the way of the eskrima stick then attempted to reacquire, managing to squeeze off a couple of shots, each striking his bullet-repellant suit to no avail, before suffering a roundhouse kick to the machine pistol sending it flying out of his hands. Almost immediately, the assailant's opposite hand fished a Sig Sauer P226 Enhanced Elite pistol from somewhere within his black leather three-quarter trench coat. Amidst deflecting jabs and punches thrown by Murdock, the gunman fired a few punctuated shots from the pistol, each expertly deflected, rerouted, or redirected by Daredevil in turn.

Things were _really_ starting to get interesting, the assassin mused to himself. First, an unknown player interferes with an otherwise perfectly executed killing at almost 900 meters out. Now, some crazy, masked lunatic clearly trained in various forms of self-defense and martial arts was beating him down with a pair of tempered, carbon-fiber combat sticks. Was he being setup? Was it _Mischief Night_ here in Hell's Kitchen?

Daredevil managed to wrestle the Sig Sauer away from the gunman who produced an identical duplicate of the pistol a moment later. The two of them struggled intensely, muscles straining, tendons bulging before the would-be killer pulled Daredevil off his feet and slammed his back into the supports of the neon hotel sign. Murdock grunted loudly and snapped his head to the side just in time to avoid a direct discharge from the assassin's gun right where his face had previously been. Murdock tried to fire the pistol he'd stolen at the assassin's foot to wound him and incapacitate him, but the assassin laughed and snapped his arm at the elbow, forcing him to gasp in pain and drop the gun.

"My guns are locked to my fingerprint only, idiot," the killer seethed in his ear, then aimed his twin Sig Sauer directly at Daredevil's head. But Murdock had other designs, and he kicked off the support beam forcing the assassin off-balance and the two of them forward. Daredevil thrust his masked skull into the face of the gunman as they lurched forward, and the assassin threw up his hands to his head in surprise and alarm. Daredevil took this opportunity to take several meaningful shots at the man's midsection, bruising a few ribs and nearly fracturing his solar plexus. The assassin produced a curved, serrated blade from his boot and kicked Murdock in the shin with it. While the material of his new suit insulated him from most of the damage, the alloy of the blade was sharp enough to draw blood. The searing pain in his leg caused Matt to stumble to one knee, giving the assassin enough time to pull out a third gun, a Smith & Wesson SD9 VE semi-automatic 9mm chrome-plated pistol. He aimed both pistols directly downward at Murdock.

"How many goddamn guns do you keep in that jacket?" Daredevil groaned, clutching the deep gash in his shin.

"As many lawyers as there are in Manhattan," the assassin grinned. Then he pulled both triggers.

* * *

It had been several minutes since another bullet came whizzing through Karen's windows and into the living room, and Foggy had lost a lot of blood. Foggy found Karen's vodka in her purse and poured some of it on his wound before pressing the bottle to his lips and taking a giant swig of the liquor.

"It's amazing how good cheap liquor tastes when you've been shot," he observed matter-of-factly.

"We need to get you to a hospital!" Karen shouted.

"He could still be out there, Karen!"

"It's a chance we'll have to take! You did the same for me that time during the explosions!"

"Don't be ridiculous, Karen! That was different!"

"Bullshit!" she said. "I'm tired of everybody treating me like I'm some, insipid, little girl that can't do anything herself! I'm going to help you and that's that!"

"Karen!" Foggy screamed.

But it was too late. Karen Page dashed over to the island in the kitchen, grabbed Foggy's briefcase off the countertop, then knelt behind it and instantly set to work finding his phone and dialing Matt.

"Karen!"

"I'm OK! I'm calling Matt!"

"Stay low to the ground!"

"Well I'm not going to get up and dance around, damn it!" she screamed back. She found Matt in Foggy's contact list and dialed him.

* * *

As the assassin was about to execute the second party to interfere with him collecting on his contract, a cell phone began to ring. Daredevil had totally forgotten he'd brought his mobile along with him one of the subdermal pockets built into his 'second skin' suit. It was enough to distract the gunman long enough for Daredevil to slam his fists into his opponent's wrists causing his arms to arc out to his sides firing stray bullets in each direction. One of the bullets ricocheted off the hotel signage and entered the water tower, causing the old, rotted wood to rupture slightly and begin to rain down upon the two men as they fought in the neon and chrome glow of Hell's Kitchen by night.

Under these conditions, Murdock could see the attacker even more clearly. Every single detail, every fold in his cloak, the weight of each gun and how many bullets remained in each weapon: one in the chamber, and the specified number still left in each clip. The man's heart rate had become more erratic as the fight raged on, his breathing more unsteady. But his reflexes had hardly diminished, nor did he seem to grow physically tired. And his eyesight and intuitive grasp of ballistic architecture was astonishing. This was a dangerous foe, and one with which one misstep would cost him his life. Perhaps this would be the night Matt would find himself staring down into the abyss of murder yet again, wondering, waiting, _hoping_ to make the plunge. All he needed was a reason. And the belief that, ultimately, he walked the path of the righteous man.

Daredevil executed a spin kick in which his foot snapped against the assassin's jaw, causing the man's teeth to gnash together. The gunman was seeing stars, and fired several shots menacingly but without aim or direction in front of him as he reeled backward. But Murdock was no longer below or in front of him—but airborne. Using a Muay Thai technique, Matt landed on his attacker's shoulders with his knees and smashed his elbows down upon the top of the man's skull. The damage and force of his attacks was such that the man lost his grip on both his weapons at once, and instead pulled out a stiletto blade from somewhere in his belt and slashed at Murdock with it. Daredevil hadn't expected such a sly, underhanded attack from a man who clearly preferred small arms fire, and he took a deep gash to his chest. He lurched back a step or two in shock, looking down at the tear in his suit and the blood now leaking from it. He looked back at the gunman who he saw, in slow motion, reaching back into his trench coat, no doubt poised to produce yet another firearm with which to blast Murdock into the next life. Without even thinking, Daredevil launched himself into the air, spun laterally to generate momentum, then snapped out into a flying roundhouse kick, his foot connecting at full-force with the man's chest, sending him flying backward toward the edge of the roof. The Devil of Hell's Kitchen had hardly intended to kick the brawler so hard, and he pivoted and lunged forward, reaching for the assassin's jacket as he teetered on the ledge of the roof for a moment before pitching backward and going over the side.

"Nooooooooo!" Murdock let out a blood-curdling scream, racing to the edge of the old hotel. He peered over the side. The assassin had fallen five stories and somehow, statistically defying incredible odds, landed in a passing garbage truck. Matt couldn't tell if the man had survived the fall, as he laid motionless, and he could no longer hear the beating of the man's heart which meant it was either too faint to be heard or had ceased to beat entirely. Only when he heard, distantly, Karen scream Foggy's name, did he snap back to reality. People needed him. His friends needed him. And his mind was clouded only by vengeance and a thirst for answers. Answers that would have to wait. In a city full of devils, angels didn't deserve to die, but once again they'd paid the price for walking among demons. The demons that lived inside everyone, each and every day and were, oftentimes, just one, single, bad motherfucker of a day from causing even the most pious man to fall from grace. But today was not that day. Somebody, somewhere, had targeted one or both of his friends. First blood had been drawn. People were going to pay, he'd make sure of it. But for now, lives were being weighed on the scales of Fate.

 _Today the saint, tomorrow the sinner_ , Daredevil thought to himself as he raced back down the stairwell to the front of the La Cabriolet Hotel building in search of the ones he loved.


	3. Chapter 3: No Rest for the Wicked

**No Rest for the Wicked**

 _By Caudimordax_

As Murdock dashed across two and a half city blocks through a veritable typhoon of freezing rain, the streets burgeoned with residents of the neighborhood marshalled to the four corners of the intersection at West 46th and 10th where a stout old woman shrieked in Mandarin at a half-sleeping grocer who answered in fiery Tamil debating whether the sound they'd heard had been gunshots or vehicular backfire. Ignoring the searing pain of his wounds shooting through every muscle, tendon and ligament in his bruised and battered body, he ascended three stories of rickety, lightless staircases and forced his way into Karen's apartment where he found her, hunched over Foggy's body. Matt could hear her erratic and accelerated heartbeat like thunder in his ears. He could hear the terror, panic and despair course through valve and ventricle of her fragile soul. As he bounded into the living room, Karen quickly snatched the Ruger SP101 from beside where Nelson's body lay motionless and pointed it directly at him. Daredevil threw up his hands to signify he meant her no harm.

"Karen, it's…" He faltered, uncertain how he should proceed in discussing his name and identity with the secretary of his daytime law practice.

Her hands trembling, the gun rattling in her tremulous grip, she snapped, "What… _the hell_ …are _**you**_ doing here?!"

"It…it's a long story…and I promise I'll tell you, Karen, but right now, I need you to trust me—"

" _Trust_ you?!" Karen sobbed. "Right now, the…the _only_ person I trust…is myself!"

With each passing second, Murdock knew Foggy was a moment closer to becoming just one more casualty in a string of criminal collateral damage that seemed to have no end in sight. He'd have to work fast.

"Without someone to trust, the world is a cold, dark place," Matt said.

"Oh yeah?" she replied, tears streaming down her flushed cheeks. "Are ya…speaking from personal experience there, or…?"

Matt could smell the liquor on her breath. "You trust Foggy Nelson, don't you?"

Karen licked her lips, rolled her eyes, then sighed, but continued to keep the handgun trained on Daredevil. "Ya know…I used to think I knew what trust was. Now… now I'm not so sure."

"Karen, I know you feel like, right now, you have all this… _pressure_ …bearing down on your shoulders—promises you've made, obligations to fulfill, plans to realize—and there's never anybody around to share the weight. And, yes, sometimes that's true. Sometimes there really isn't anyone you can trust, and you are completely alone. But _right now_ it doesn't have to be. Not anymore. The choices you make… _right this moment_ …can reopen that place you keep locked up…deep in the darkest place in your heart. You'll find that you never really lost the ability to trust; you just…you've just got to _look_ at the situation differently. With _..._ a fresh pair of eyes…so to speak…"

"And what if I don't want to open up that place again?"

"Then that man on the floor beside you is going to die. I saved your life once before Karen; please, now let me save his. Please. I beg you."

For several long moments, Karen continued to keep the barrel of the pistol aimed directly at Daredevil, a staunch promise to plug a round directly into him—center mass—which, even if it didn't penetrate the new suit lining, might be enough to temporarily take him out of commission. "If you…if you do a single thing other than try to save his life…I will paint that mask of yours with a fresh coat of red, do you understand me?"

Matt nodded acquiescingly. "I understand."

Karen lowered the Ruger as Daredevil rushed to Foggy's side. He removed his glove then held his hand, palm down, just above Foggy's mouth. After a moment, he said, "Breathing. Weakly, but he's breathing." Suddenly, he stiffened up and turned his head sideways, straining to hear something distant and faraway.

"What?" Page wondered aloud. "What is it?"

After a moment, Murdock returned to examining Foggy's wounds, starting first with the wound in his side—the most superficial of the bunch—before moving onto his grazed ear and lastly his arm, the worst of the injuries. "There is a medical response unit about three and a half blocks away, and two police cruisers two blocks behind them, all responding to a 10-10 'shots fired' at this address. Pretty quick response. Could just be dumb luck. Alternatively, somebody working for Wilson called it in early and these guys are on Fisk's payroll. Can't be sure, but we don't have time to find out. Right now, it's a chance we're going to have to take."

"What?!" Karen exclaimed.

"Karen, Foggy's lost almost a third of his blood. Paramedics are less than five minutes out. It's his best shot at survival. We've done all we can right now. Even if we could stay here and stabilize him ourselves, the police would most likely arrest the both of us on sight and then he'd probably die anyway."

"This is crazy! We can't just let them take him!"

"We don't have a choice! I told you I would try to save his life…I meant that. This is the best way."

He got up and went to the window, looking at the bullet holes in the glass and gazing upward in the direction of the rooftop of the Cabriolet where the assassin had established his perch. "Karen…I need to ask you something, and I need you to be completely honest with me."

Karen stroked Foggy's hair absent-mindedly. "What?" she sniffled miserably.

"Karen…did…did anything happen recently that…that you didn't tell Foggy Nelson or Matthew Murdock about? Anything at all? Something…something you've…kept secret from virtually everyone?"

Page froze. The small, platinum-blond hairs on the back of her neck stood up. The feeling of nauseating dread swelling in her stomach was now amplified one hundred times over. The dizziness of being drunk suddenly seemed to reassert itself with untimely capriciousness. She steadied herself against the broken coffee table. "What? Huh? Like what?"

Murdock knew she was lying; he had known since she'd accosted him in his apartment days ago. She was burying something, something truly terrible, so terrible in fact that she could tell no one, not even Matt or Foggy. Whatever it was, it was killing her the same way that his own double life was slowly killing him.

"Karen, I need to know if there is _any reason_ someone might be trying to kill you, and we _really_ don't have much time."

"Me?" Karen whispered. "You think somebody was trying to kill me?"

Murdock placed his ungloved hand against the cold and broken glass of the window pane. "Karen, tonight a highly-trained sniper attempted to execute you from almost three city blocks away with a sniper rifle so lethally modified the sale of it has been outlawed in more than eighteen different countries."

"What if he was trying to kill Foggy? He did a damn near-perfect job of that!"

"No…Karen… he wasn't trying to kill Foggy."

"How do you know that?"

"Union Allied. Ben Urich. Fisk, and most recently his ailing mother…"

Karen's jaw hung open for a moment. "H…how did you know about Fisk's mother?"

Murdock turned and folded his arms across his chest. "Do you seriously think I haven't investigated thoroughly every single facet of Wilson Fisk's life? You have to know your enemy if you can hope to defeat him."

"Fine! But they could have killed me in any number of ways! Ways far cheaper and easier than paying somebody…God knows how much…to put a bullet in my head from several football fields away!"

"Karen, your life is almost certainly in danger. Now Foggy's life hangs in the balance. Whatever this thing is that's eating you alive…I've got to know about it. I need to find the guy who tried to kill you…the guy who… (he stifled a sob)… who _almost_ killed a friend tonight. I've…I've got to make him pay. Whoever he is."

"I can't possibly trust you," Page groaned. "You show up out of nowhere, save my life, then disappear back into wherever it is you came from in the first place! Then you're on the news…hunted like the masked vigilante that you—" she hiccupped, covered her mouth, belched into her hand, then continued unabashedly, "—that you totally are! Now you just… _show up_ …and expect me to trust you?! No. No, no, no. If I trusted you just like that, then I haven't learned anything from any of this, have I? Right now, there's only one person in the world I trust besides the man lying unconscious on the ground." She pulled out her mobile phone. Before Daredevil sensed what was going on, she had opened the device and tried dialing Matt again. The Devil of Hell's Kitchen leapt up off the couch in the center of the room in an attempt to stop her, but it was too late. The phone belonging to Matt Murdock began to play the theme to the popular television series _Law & Order _from inside the subdermal armored pocket built into the flanks of Daredevil's suit. Murdock froze in mid stride, quietly hissing, " _Fuck_ ," to himself. Karen stared at the masked, costumed man in front of her in abject disbelief. She began to sway for several moments before she fainted and collapsed atop the near-lifeless body of Matt's other closest confident.

* * *

Only as the grief of having nearly lost Vanessa and the rage of losing Wesley diminished to more manageable levels of righteous indignation did Wilson Fisk truly start to accept the reality of his current situation—and the pressing need to change it. What little optimism he could muster was doubtlessly due to the fact that the professional he had hired to find Wesley's killer had arrived in town, that the appropriate funds had been transferred to designated accounts, and that a plan was already well underway to negotiate his release from Rikers. All he had to do, he'd been told, was sit tight. But waiting for things to change was not the Kingpin's strong suit; rather, he fancied himself the very agent of change in a city completely devoid of it. But from behind these walls of steel and stone, he could do nothing. Not directly, anyway.

Fisk stared unappeasably downward at the turbid sludge that passed for food as it coagulated upon the cafeteria tray. A depressing imitation of shepherd's pie, a side of partially-cooked peas and a sliver of year-old cornbread were a far cry from the swanky and garish meals he had enjoyed routinely prior to his incarceration. He imagined enjoying a generous cut of sautéed Dover sole atop a steamy bed of almond-pistachio barberry golden basmati marinating in a chardonnay-shallot emulsion, accompanied by an absurdly expensive bottle of Montrachet Grand or another of Wesley's recommendations. His loyal aid had certainly known his grapes. But this…whatever _this_ was…was inedible. Not befitting of a kingpin at all.

"Y…y-yo man…i-if you ain't gonna eat dat," a voice said from across the table.

Fisk looked up into the hopeful eyes of a frightfully thin, heavily-inked black kid who probably wasn't even old enough to buy alcohol legally. The boy's hair was cornrowed tightly against a tattooed skull which, in conjunction with a large scar running perpendicular to his mouth straight down his right cheek, resulted in making him look far more menacing than he doubtlessly was. Fisk shook his head and quietly muttered, "No," before pushing the tray slowly in the boy's direction. The inmate took it, and began to eat from it ravenously.

"H…how can you…e-eat that?" the Kingpin asked incredulously.

The young, self-proclaimed _thug_ rolled his marble-colored eyes and sighed deeply, leaning forward on his elbows. He suckled the grease and starch from the cornbread crumbs off his fingers as he enlightened the Kingpin about the culinary rituals of New York's most infamous prison.

"Look, man, it's like this," he began in a hushed voice. The inmate's colorful Ebonics, a hallmark of the poverty-level caste of society denied access to even basic educational institutions, disappeared without a trace. "Up until about two years ago, Rikers had one of the most reputable in-house prisoner culinary internship programs not just in New York, but in the entire fucking world. Inordinate amounts of taxpayer money and yearly fundraisers went toward forging partnerships with N.Y.U. and the International Culinary Center to bring cooking programs right into the jails themselves. Inmates could get time away from the less desirable duties by apprenticing in the kitchens, cleaning meat freezers, mopping floors, stacking trays, counting eggs, whatever-the-fuck, you name it. An Inmate Culinary Council was formed where the prisoners themselves would request a budget and devise their own food schedule, menus and suppliers. Hell, we had regular events and contests, like _Race Wars_ when all the minorities competed to make the best traditional food. It was good shit. Gave a lot of talented prisoners something to do. Something to be proud of."

"But then?" asked Fisk, sensing he was about to hit the turn to the boy's tale.

The kid finished licking the last of his fingers. "But then," he continued, "all that changed when Senator Cherryh took control around and used his political influence to cut all the funding to the food programs. Now we ain't got shit around here, and that _shepherd's pie_ you just passed up is the absolute best it gets up in this joint. _Ya feel me?_ "

Wilson nodded, grimacing at the irony that his partnership with the sleazy, sordid, political slime-ball Cherryh would come full circle and bite him in the ass in something so irritatingly prosaic and pedestrian. Perhaps, he wondered abstractly, there really _was_ something to the concept of karma. Something… _deeper_ … _beyond_ the scope of his limited, mortal, fetal vantage could possibly hope to illuminate him to.

"H-h-hey, wait," Fisk stammered under his breath, leaning forward across the table as much as his girth would allow. "Tell me why you talk like the rest of this uneducated, ghetto rabble when you're clearly not cut from the same intellectual cloth as the others?"

" _Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance_ ," the kid replied with a venerable sneer that reminded Fisk of the wiry old villain in an old Chinese kung-fu movie.

Wilson reclined on the bench with a look of surprise and measured delight. "Sun Tzu," the Kingpin recognized the source of the quotation. "The Art of War."

"Being smart _in here_ , isn't currency. It's a death sentence. Here…in Rikers…the way to win the war is to become as invisible as humanly possible. This isn't my first time up in the joint, you know? When I be all up in here, all I fuckin' got is time. Read a lot of books. Was even on the debate club when it was still around."

"Cherryh?"

The kid nodded grimly, then continued on. "I've learned some shit," he said, tapping on the side of his tattooed skull. "I've learned that when you're at war, the name of the game isn't to look like you're the most powerful playa on the block. It's to be the playa that nobody's ever heard of that owns the motherfuckin' block."

Kingpin marveled at the fact that this young-blood, hood rat drug dealer had ultimately reached the same conclusion he himself had reached. Until very recently, nobody had ever heard the name Wilson Fisk. Even the endless abyss of worldwide web knew very little if anything at all about Fisk and his exploits, and he'd preferred to keep it that way. Until, that is, until his hand had been forced. And very suddenly he'd gone from a nobody to a very big somebody that everyone loved and then to an even bigger somebody that certainly everybody despised. Everybody except Vanessa. And Wesley. And now the former had been seriously injured, and the ladder was dead. Fisk scratched the grizzle forming upon his neck and jawline and stared at the boy inquisitively.

"A-a-and…and if the enemy learns of your superiority…learns who you are…about those closest to you…those you…that you… _care_ …about…then what do you do?"

The young thug straightened his posture and tilted his head left, then right, cracking and popping the muscles in his neck.

"Sun Tzu also tells us, 'He will win who knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces'. There is no place for ego in these dangerous games we play."

"So…so I must determine the size, force, and ability of my enemies…and determine if he is superior or inferior. In doing so, victory is assured."

"Do not be deceived," the boy retorted, his voice suddenly cold and distant. "There are forces that still abound in this world, forces beyond either your understanding or control. Most of the time, you wouldn't even recognize one if you stared right at it. Other times, they are far more obvious and easy to detect. And I'm well aware that _you,_ _ **Mr. Fisk**_ , have seen them with your own eyes."

The Kingpin began to feel an increasingly bothersome sense of dread and unease. The boy's marble eyes were brightly fixed upon him now.

"I-I don't know what you're talking about," he stammered.

" _Precious cargo_ ," the thug seethed through closed teeth. "The docks. Invaluable commodities, censored freight manifests and redacted customs documents. Asano Robotics. Owlsley moving funds to assure stamped approval of shipping containers. Do you… _remember_ …Mr. Fisk…what you saw inside one of those containers?"

Wilson nodded, his mind reeling with questions and implications. "W-w-wait a minute, just wait a damn second!" The Kingpin felt helplessly disarmed, for it seemed that this mere street urchin to whom he'd given his dinner knew virtually every single thing about his life and criminal enterprise.

"The young children…chained and bound by cold, mechanical devices."

Images of the young Asian children Fisk had witnessed twice before flashed into the fore of his addled conscious. One had been a young boy, perhaps six or seven years old, a pigeon-toed youngster with big round eyes. The other was a girl somewhere between the ages of ten and twelve, a pale-skinned waif of a thing with long, messy, black hair that tumbled nearly down to her midriff, a prominent nose, and a scar on her chin. Fisk had known better than to ask questions. He'd given it a minute of thought at the time, suspecting they were either slaves or hostages, but in either case were important commodities in some form of illicit and illegal activities. Criminal masterminds didn't routinely pry into the finer details of their affiliate's goings-on.

"Yes, yes, what about them?"

"You and your pithy, self-important war, Mr. Fisk, have interfered to great detriment in a battle that is far, far older than you can possibly imagine or appreciate. I regret that I have neither the time nor the patience to explain something so historically intricate and spiritually significant to you under these circumstances, but alas, here we are. In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have deprived you of the pie because I can easily think of far worse last meals than that one."

At that very moment, the young hoodlum pulled back the sleeve of his prison uniform, revealing a large, black, calligraphy-brush-style tattoo of the glyph used by agents of _The Hand_ , the organization to which Nobu had belonged.

"You were sent…to kill me…" Fisk whispered somberly.

" _In my mind I'm a blind man doin' time,_ " the other quoted.

"Sun Tzu again?" Wilson wondered.

The inmate smirked. "That was Tupac."

In but a fraction of a second, the skinny, would-be Japanese assassin's hand flashed out to his side as he seemingly materialized an improvised serrated blade from within the nebulous depths of his uniform sleeve and lunged across the lunchroom table at Fisk, both arms outstretched. The Kingpin barely had time to throw up his guard, snatching the boy by his wrists and averting a vicious slice aimed at his jugular vein by pulling him down onto the bench beside him. Fisk only had his enemy in his grasp for a moment as the kid lashed out with a serious of swift, well-placed kicks practiced and executed sufficiently enough to bruise one or two of Fisk's ribs and forcing him backward onto the floor.

By now, the current population in the cafeteria had formed a circle around the precipitous outbreak of murderous barbarism and had broken out into a deafening discord of whooping and screaming. Alarms that sounded like nuclear launch sirens whirred unheeded by anyone beyond the prison guards who struggle to mobilize and respond in kind.

The assassin sent by The Hand to rid Manhattan of Wilson Fisk was immediately atop the Kingpin yet again, his small, tight fists crashing down upon the other's face. Fisk tried desperately to protect himself, but several powerful hooks and jabs snuck through, snapping his nose in two places, splitting his lower lip, and lubricating his face with a paste of blood, spit and food crumbs. Wilson roared with defiance, grabbing the assassin by the scuff of his uniform and introduced the solid plate of his cranium to the soft tissue of his opponent's face. There was a crack so sickening that it could be heard above the din of the cheering inmates, a blow so shocking that the agent of The Hand stumbled backward, groping the air blindly as for several moments he saw nothing but a deep field of black nothingness and specks and flashes of blinding white. Fisk rose to his feet, picked up the tray on the cafeteria table beside him, then proceeded to slam it with the full force of his bicep's might against the side of the kid's face as the crowd behind him pushed him forward back into the fight.

The Kingpin took three long strides, coming up alongside the assassin who had crumpled to his knees and was clutching his face in agony. Wilson thrust his right knee sharply upward, but incredibly his enemy shifted his hands from his face immediately to a blocking position and deflected the blow just in time to punish it with a savage punch to the kneecap. Fisk shrieked as an electric shock fired through his entire foot, leg, and spine that felt in both muscle and mind like his entire body had been cast into a giant frying pan and his bones were being charcoaled by voltaic fire. The young kid then launched himself into a somersault, snapping his foot with dizzying velocity into Fisk's lower jaw resulting in a gnashing of teeth and a biting of tongue so excruciatingly harrowing it took every single tendon, fiber, muscle and ligament in his body to stop him from blacking out.

 _Vanessa_ , he thought to himself. _If I don't get to her, Silvermane will. My destiny does not end here. Not tonight. Not to this punk._ This, like many before it, was simply another trial. If nothing else, it confirmed that the Japanese were at least involved in some aspect of the Vanessa conspiracy, and certainly that elements within the Yakuza wanted him dead. And if that were true, they were going to have to do a lot better than this two-bit, trophies-in-the-window karate-school drop-out.

The Hand's urban assassin brandished his shank once more and came at Wilson, his slender arms attacking in a flurry of unpredictable, fluid and well-timed katas. Fisk proved his competency in his own study of martial arts, bending his arms, deflecting with his palms and rotating his wrists to maintain offensive superiority whenever the other tried to bait him into a debilitating lock. The assassin cut him several times along his forearms, elbows and shoulders but Wilson's adrenaline was pumping with such purpose that he felt nothing but the addictive elation of battle lust. In all things, the Kingpin was patient, and Fisk bided his time, dodging and weaving, blocking and reposting until the assassin, unused to negotiating opponents the size of Fisk, overextended, and Fisk caught the kid's arm in an arm bar, stepped toward him as he rotated his torso and applied far more downward torque than would ever be necessary to snap the assassin's arm. And did.

The prison guards only saw the grizzly aftermath of what happened next. As a large fragment of bone tore straight out of and through his former lunch mate's arm, the thug screamed shrilly and collapsed against the cafeteria table beside him, lying on his back and clutching his mangled limb. Fisk stood over him, his enormous shadow silhouetting the eviscerated body of his scrawny opponent. Wilson took several deep breaths, his massive shoulders rising and falling, each breath more measured and collected than the one before it. Then he stooped over and picked up the knife from the tile floor. He leaned forward and regarded his defeated foe.

"A blind man doing time," Fisk mused, pinning the man against the table as he began to carve the kid's eyes out with his own shank. Like layers of an onion, Fisk set to work shucking the dermal and subdermal layers of flesh, sinew, cartilage and fat around the man's eyes, each layer accompanied by a bloodcurdling scream until the thug assasin's vocal chords became too shredded and torn themselves to produce audible noise. By the time the guards were on the scene, there was no noise at all in the cafeteria beyond the _shlhkkkk_ of ocular membranes and nerves being filleted. Every single inmate present in the cafeteria simply looked on, paralyzed with horror and disbelief as Wilson brutalized his assailant, one piece at a time, with a certain smug satisfaction while he explained all the while to his victim that he would intentionally allow him to live so that he could go back and tell whoever the hell he worked for in the Yakuza that war had officially been declared, and that the Japanese of Hell's Kitchen better be prepared to reap what they sow. At length, he ceased the primal butchery of The Hand's rent-a-thug and leaned against the table, then wiped the blood off the shank upon his sleeve as he talked to the unconscious body of his fallen adversary.

"You're a black man working for a Japanese organization quoting Chinese proverbs. Some say it's diversity that makes this city great…makes it… _what_ …it is. I say what makes this city great is being able to obliterate and eradicate freaks like you and _getting away with it_. You want to know… _why…_ you can get away with it? Because nobody likes a freak. Nobody likes outliers. Outcasts. Non-contributing detritus and insufferable wastes of resources just _teeming_ forth from every gutter, every alleyway, every sinkhole, every rat-infested dive bar in this bloated cesspool of a city that already has far too many of both." He ran his massive hand slowly, gently over the boy's cornrows. He leaned forward and kissed him quietly on the forehead. "I did you a favor," he whispered softly. "I've given you a world without evil. And in a world without evil, the only thing left is _nothing_."

And then the prison guards were upon him.

* * *

Ben McLain was not happy. As he sat unobtrusively veiled in the shadows of the back of a poorly-lit truck stop adjacent to the overpass where he'd woken up to a fresh shower of garbage and refuse, he replayed the earlier events of the evening in his mind and could come up with no logical explanation for how his perfectly planned operation had been cocked-up so unbelievably quickly, and by a masked lunatic that fights with sticks, no less. McLain barely heard the waitress ask if he'd like his coffee warmed up, and his response to the question was autonomous when he simply handed her the cup and muttered his assent.

Very soon, Ben knew, he'd be getting a call. He was four hours past SITREP. By now, he'd fully expected to have made _the call_ , report in to his handler, deliver the good news, then receive the codes to verify the wire transfers for services rendered spread out across the designated accounts. He'd done the routine hundreds of times in his long and storied history as a career, world-class hitman. And by now, somebody, somewhere, was beginning to wonder what the fuck had gone wrong. Four hours after the fiasco atop _Le Cabriolet Hotel_ , he still wasn't exactly sure what he planned to tell them. The buzzing upon the pager clipped to his hip told him, much to his chagrin, that his employer was requesting a check in. McLain swore under his breath, pulled the cigarette wedged between his shaved head and his ear out with two fingers, placed it in his mouth and lit it as he headed out the back door to the truck stop.

For check-in calls, Ben McLain always used payphones. This method was becoming increasingly difficult lately since more and more payphones were being phased out of existence as the digital age ravenously devoured every surviving trace of its analog forebears. However, diligent reconnaissance of relevant boroughs and locales was the key to speedy and expeditious phone calls with clients and middle men. It was pouring rain outside, and Ben had to light another cigarette by the time he'd reached the payphone as the first was utterly destroyed by precipitation. He pulled a crumpled up piece of paper out of his jacket pocket and dialed the phone number on it. Then he pressed the receiver to his ear and waited for the series of beeps followed by the thirty second clip of the original 1955 song, _Only You_ by _The Platters._ A moment later, it sounded like there was a snap and a crackle over the line, then a woman with a strong Belgian accent spoke, very-obviously an international switch-board operator for satellite phone networks and encrypted trunk lines operating on DOD nodes.

"Code in," she said.

"Hudson. Stormcrow. Four, zero, nine, seven, nine, eight, zero, three, one. Affinity. Philadelphia. Tango. Barbados."

The line crackled again.

"Please hold."

There was nothing but the deafening crash of freezing rain upon crumbling concrete for nearly thirty seconds.

"This is Morgan. Client wants an update."

"Tell the client we'll need to reschedule our dinner date," Ben replied.

"Dinner date is firm. Adjustment will be costly."

"Is the contract open?"

"Wait," the Asian-sounding woman on the other end of the line said. A moment later, she replied, "Negative. No other assets tasked with assignment."

"Another asset was in play at dinner party. If not ours, then who?"

"Wait," she said again.

"Yeah, I ain't going anywhere in this fuckin' shit," Ben grumbled, staring out at the worsening weather.

"Describe asset," Morgan said at length.

"About six feet. Athletic. Dark red suit. Might have had… _horns_ …of some kind on it, couldn't be sure. Oh yeah, and the guy fights with goddamn sticks."

"Hold again please," she said. Then, "Client requests an _Ellis Island Salute_."

Ben took a deep drag of his cigarette, then shook his head impatiently. "No. Don't do meet and greets with things this hot."

"It is risky, but necessary. Your failure tonight will be overlooked. Client will double your fee if you consider his proposal—face-to face."

"I…I was under the impression our client ' _doesn't do'_ face to face."

"This is an exceptional situation," Morgan replied. "Can we expect you at _The Ziggurat_ in an hour?"

"Yes."

"Good. And Ben?"

"Yeah?"

"For Christ's sake, clean yourself up. Take a damn shower. Put on something nice. You smell like a dumpster."

"How…how the hell would you know that?" McLain marveled, slack-jawed.

"The waitress that poured your coffee. She was ours."

The line clicked and went dead. Ben shook his head and placed the phone back on the receiver. "The plot thickens," he mused with a wry chuckle before he picked up the phone once more and called for a yellow cab.


	4. Chapter 4: The Man in the High Castle

**The Man in the High Castle**

 _By Caudimordax_

* * *

"He's lost a hell of a lot of blood," the first EMT shouted over the harmonic cacophony of siren wail and thundering rain as the ambulance carrying Foggy Nelson tore across town in the direction of Metro General Hospital.

The other paramedic finished clamping off a tourniquet before grabbing the radio receiver off the wall clip beside him and depressing the talk button. "Inbound with thirty-four year-old white male, multiple gunshot wounds, heartrate falling—Jason, I need those large bore IVs setup, stat!—respiration is anemic."

The first paramedic, Jason, introduced an IV into the antecubital areas of each of Franklin's arms and ran fluid as the other EMS responder checked Foggy's breathing one last time before fitting an oxygen mask over his face. His next standard operating procedure was to clean the entry and exit wounds with purified water before applying Celox-A coagulant gel to help prevent exsanguination.

"Gus, I'm hooking up the ECG!" Jason said.

"Do it!" Gus replied, bandaging the wounds and applying extra pressure. "Watch for arrhythmia; we don't want him going into defib!"

"Heartrate fluctuating…Christ he's really unstable, Gus!"

"Multiple gunshot wounds! Could be pneumothorax, could be pericardial tamponade, any number of things! I think he's gone into shock!" Gus knocked on the window behind him. "How much time?"

"Five minutes out," the driver of the ambulance yelled over the din.

"Drive faster!" the paramedic shouted back.

"Gus, vitals are crashing!"

"Jason, hit him with 3ccs of epinephrine; I'll get the paddles juiced!"

The EMS worker procured an EpiPen and primed it before injecting the contents of the syringe into Foggy's left thigh. Almost instantly, Nelson's eyes snapped open and he began to cough and gasp for air, color slowly beginning to return to his pallid face.

"Oh! Oh God! Karen! What…? Argh… Oh God… Where… Karen…"

"Sir, please try and remain calm and don't move," Gus started. "You're in the back of an ambulance right now, and you've been shot! We're taking you to Metro General Hospital but you need to talk as little as possible and _remain calm_!"

"Karen!" Foggy repeated, ignoring the paramedic. "Where's Karen?!"

"Who? Sir, you were the only one at the scene when we arrived! We—"

"Nnnno!" screamed Nelson frantically, writhing this way and that as he attempted to remove the lattice of wires and EMS electrode pads. "I gotta… gotta get back… find Karen… she's… someone tried to shoot us!"

"And they did a very good job, so I need you to lie back down, please, sir, and let us do our jobs. There are police searching and securing the scene we found you at, so rest assured, if this Karen person is there, they'll find her."

* * *

But the police didn't find Karen Page, because Karen Page had been stuffed into the back of a black, 1998 BMW M3 which the Daredevil saw fit to 'borrow', and was relocated back to Murdock's apartment while Matt worked out a plausible lie and cover story to explain why in Hell's Kitchen the masked vigilante had wound up with the blind lawyer's mobile phone. Every muscle in his body burned with immeasurable agony as he carried the limp body of Nelson & Murdock's legal assistant up three flights of rickety old stairs and kicked open the door to his apartment. His mind raced with thoughts of Foggy Nelson, wondering if the paramedics had reached him on time and had provided him with the medical care he'd needed. Based on his own reading of the situation—listening to the tempo and meter of his heartbeat, detecting the subtleties of his body temperature, smelling the blood and wounds for signs of sepsis or internal bleeding—Foggy would live, but his recovery would not necessarily be swift or even painless. As Matt gently laid Karen's body down upon one of the armchairs opposite the couch, he realized immediately that he'd have to worry about Franklin Nelson later, for at the moment, he was not alone.

It was the sound of a steel blade sliding against a wooden scabbard that tipped him off to the four ninjas that were slowly, noiselessly closing in around him. Murdock's own heart skipped a beat as he realized that he was completely deaf to the rhythmic pumping of blood through the ventricles and atria of his ninjas' hearts, an incredibly important and vital sound he'd trained for years to track, assess, read and react to. All he could hear was the metal of their weapons and the occasional creak of the ancient wooden floorboards present all throughout his flat. He rose slowly from the couch, drawing his combat sticks from their sheath.

"I make a point not to kill my enemies, just disable or maim them," Daredevil began, "but I've had a hell of a night, and if all of you don't leave this apartment in the next three seconds, I may have to break my rule. One. Two."

But before Murdock could finish his count, one of the ninjas, garbed completely from head to foot in midnight black cloth, drew two, twin kodachi and rushed Daredevil. Matt whipped one of his combat batons directly through the air at the ninja at the same time that he launched himself off the coffee table and through the air; the stick collided with the ninja's skull with a loud clang of metal against bone causing the warrior to stagger directly into Daredevil's flying kick that propelled him backward into the glass shelves lining the wall.

Two more came at him almost immediately. They were quick, silent, and deadly. Steel arced and sliced through nothingness, for Daredevil could literally hear the sharpness of their blades cutting softly through air, allowing him to bob, weave, duck and parry like the true son of a boxer, twisting and bending his body as he lashed out at his enemies with patient, timely strikes and jabs. The first ninja had climbed back to his feet with the help of the fourth, and both of them were about to join the fight when a hand suddenly latched onto one of the ninja's shoulders, pulling him back into Murdock's bedroom where an unknown combatant went to work, shattering bone and ripping sinew in order to even out the playing field. The first of the four ninjas, surprised and bewildered, followed his comrade into the bedroom only to find himself swiftly embroiled in the fight of his life.

It was part fatigue from his battle with the rooftop assassin earlier that night and part distractedness thinking about Karen and the conclusions she may have drawn that made him sloppier in combat than usual. One or two of their blades managed to slip the net of his defenses, and of these a handful somehow penetrated the carbon nanofiber weave of the suit Melvin made for him. Murdock cried out each time their whetted steel licked his flesh, drawing forth the crimson tide of his will. These ninja were fast, accurate, and determined, and Daredevil struggled desperately to still the clamor in his own heart. Effortlessly they seemed to duck out of the way of his punches, torqueing their agile bodies through the air evading every roundhouse and sidekick he levied at them.

In the bedroom, the guest star of the battle was faring far better. One of the ninjas slashed downward through the air with his kodachi, but before the blade ever reached its destination, Stick grabbed the man's arm, stepped toward the ninja and rotated his body one hundred eighty degrees, wrenching his opponent's arm backward and snapping the radius of his right forearm. The warrior howled in pain, a cry that was cut short as the sword that he'd previously been holding was used to create a brand new airway in his neck. The second ninja's eyes bulged as he watched the fountain of blood spew forth from his ally's neck, then he lunged at his enemy, thrusting with a katana. Stick kicked the blade away with the heel of his boot as though it were merely an annoyance, then snapped his right fist into the ninja's surprised face with a deafening crack. The assassin's face exploded as his broken nose fountained blood outward into the air and into the fists that swiftly followed the first blow in rapid, deliberate procession.

The ninja were truly like no opponents Matt Murdock had ever faced. They weren't like the usual, criminal rabble of Hell's Kitchen; these warriors were exceedingly well-trained, their skills sharply honed, their reflexes precise and reactionary on a level that was almost unworldly. Their heartbeats were masked by a meditative control over their own circulatory systems and manifested as only the most distant, ephemeral vibrations in the aether of Matt's unique sense of aural sight. Their movements and attacks were betrayed only by their reliance on the weapons they employed in the service of their dark masters. They lashed out at him, came at him, their swords, knives and throwing stars glimmers of light in an ocean of otherworldly shadows. Murdock parried and deflected the swords with his combat batons, one after the other, striking back in a flurry of blows that fractured the wrist and femur of the ninja who had first attacked him. The second assailant kicked him backward and he fell against the couch, causing it to tip over backward as he rolled back off it. In slow motion, Daredevil watched the ninja launch himself into the air in a 'bird of prey' type position, seemingly flying over the toppled couch, sword raised above his head in preparation to deliver a killing blow. But it took more than fancy footwork, a few seconds hang-time, and a sharpened blade to kill a devil. Murdock blocked the sword by crossing his combat batons above his head before bringing his knee up into the ninja's gut with such force that it caused the assassin to wretch into the fabric of his mask, dropping his own blade noisily to the floor beside him. Matt kicked it away as the ninja reached for it, then clubbed the man on the back of his head with a combat baton. Lights out for one, still one to go.

Stick gave a dry, callous laugh as his remaining opponent attended him with a series of tired, mechanical kata that he'd seen countless times before. He sidestepped his enemy and shoved him away, folding his arms across his chest disapprovingly. "If I'd had known training and discipline in _The Hand_ was this worthless, I wouldn't have wasted so much of my damn time teaching people to kill you pricks," Stick chuckled wryly, deflecting and redirecting more of his enemy's futile attacks. Finally he tired of the humiliation game, and when the ninja came at him again, he knocked his blade out of his hand with a snap kick before thrusting his right hand forth at a furious speed and savagely tore a chunk of flesh out of the ninja's windpipe. The warrior fell to the floor of Matt's bedroom, wide-eyed and drowning in his own blood. Stick shook his head disappointedly, brushing off his faded, olive combat fatigues before joining Murdock in the living room.

"What are you doing here?" Daredevil asked, breathing heavily, his hands balled up into fists over the groaning body of his defeated foe.

"Yeah, it's nice to see you again too, Matty," Stick countered. "Oh and don't worry about thanking me for saving your neck— _again_ —from getting cut to pieces by these assholes."

"I wasn't planning to," Murdock retorted irascibly. "You… _killed_ …those men, Stick. You _killed_ them."

"And they were trying to kill me," the other replied. "I was simply reacting in self-defense."

"Self…defense…Stick… You tore that man's larynx out and turned the other one into a human Pez dispenser. That isn't _self-defense_ , Stick, that's murder, and it's barbaric and evil."

"Yeah, well, I guess I always had a flair for the dramatic, Matty, OK? Sue me, why don't you? You're the lawyer."

"Cute," Daredevil said. "Now answer my question. _What_ are you doing here? If you don't start talking in the next few seconds—" the ninja at Matt's feet began to move slowly, and he slammed his foot into the man's side causing him to stop writhing and go fetal, "—you're going to end up like these goons. Start talking."

Stick shook his head and walked past Matt through the living room and into the kitchen. He stopped at the refrigerator, opened it, and procured two cold beers. He popped the cap to each on the buckle of his belt, offered one to Murdock who tilted his head with an expression that seemed to say, _Are you serious?_ , and Stick simply shrugged, placed the second beer upon the kitchen island, leaned back, took a refreshing swig, then began to talk. "Matty, as per usual, you've got your head stuck so far up your own damn ass with your whole, 'self-righteous crusader act' that you can barely see past the horns of that mask of yours what the hell is really going on in this city."

"Sure, Stick, why don't ya tell me what I've been missing then, yeah?"

The other sighed. "Matty, I would if I could tell you, but there are just certain things that you're not ready to hear yet."

Daredevil took several quick strides toward Stick. "See, that's the real problem with you, Stick, isn't it?" Murdock started. "You just… _always_...have to be better than somebody…have to keep secrets from people so that you've still got some…I don't know…some _value_ to somebody…a purpose. Well you know what? _I'm done with you_ , just like you were done with me all those years ago. I don't _**need**_ you, Stick. This is _my_ city… not yours. And I'm gonna fix it… _my way_. And nobody else is going to die."

Stick guzzled his brew indifferently. "I trained you," he began. "I gave you the tools and the skills you needed to survive in a world that wanted only to take advantage of you and to use you. I never pitied you or felt sorry for you or underestimated you like literally _everyone_ else does, Matthew. I showed you a layer of the world beneath the surface, a slice of reality that most people never truly _see_. And you were good, Matty, real good. Sure you don't want a beer?"

"No, Stick, I don't want a beer."

"Suit yourself, I'm drinking it then," Stick scowled. "Matt, what I showed you, what I trained you to see…that was all just a slice…a single layer of a much, deeper, more stratified pie. Personally, I don't think you're ready to move on just yet because you're still so unbelievably young and stupid, but I'm running out of time and tonight is the proof that I've been looking for."

"Proof of _what_ , Stick?" Daredevil shouted with growing irritation.

"Matty, you already know a little bit about the _Hand_ ," Stick began.

Murdock nodded impatiently. "Yeah, I fought against one of their elites. Nobu. They've been involved with some criminal stuff here before, mostly import/export, drugs, human trafficking. You murdered one of the children they were smuggling in cold blood."

"That _thing_ I killed, Matt, was many things, but a child is not one of them," Stick said coldly. "I did what had to be done…what you should have done. What you _never_ have the stomach to man up and do. But Matt, the hour approaches that you _will_ have to make the hard choice. For the good of the city, will you be able to do it?"

"Nobody has to die," Matt refrained his earlier position.

Stick looked at the girl who lay motionless in one of the armchairs. "What about her? Matt, if she's involved, they'll come for her, and they won't stop coming for her—"

"Yes, and, and when that happens, I-I'll deal with it," Matt quipped back with annoyance. "I still don't know why somebody was trying to kill her or who was trying to kill her, but I'm going to find out."

"Then you're going to need my help, Matthew, because you can't protect all these cute little friends you've been collecting _and_ fight off The Hand _and_ deal with the backlash of your involvement with Fisk _and_ juggle this ridiculous joke of a legal practice you're trying to atone for your nightly sins with—Matty, let's be real with each other for a minute, you can't do this alone."

"I will not work alongside a murderer," Daredevil took a stand.

Stick gestured widely with his arms. "Matt, look around you! These guys we took out weren't the usual Kitchen crackhead or gangbanger; these guys are trained ninjas, Matt. This isn't kids' stuff you're messing with anymore."

"I don't care, Stick. I don't. Nobody dies. Justice is served inside of a court room, not at the barrel of a gun or by the edge of a sword."

"That's a nice fairy tale view of the world you got there, Matty," Stick sighed deeply, "and if it helps you sleep at night, well that's just peachy. But us adults have to be realistic. There is a terrifyingly deadly group of assassins posturing to takeover this very city as we speak, and this is just the beginning. I don't know why these ninja were sent here tonight, but they weren't sent here to kill anyone. They were sent here to find something. Or someone."

"And how exactly do you know that?" Murdock shot back.

"Because if they'd come to kill us, they'd have poisoned their blades, and from the looks of it, they got you nice and good with that steel of theirs."

Matt looked at the incisions in his uniform, cursing quietly as he knew he'd have to pay Melvin yet another, late-night visit. He had begun to feel the burning coldness of a flesh wound as it bled into his suit. He rubbed at his side uncomfortably.

"You should get that looked at," Stick offered casually, taking another swig of his beer.

"Keep talking. What are the Hand planning? What do you know?"

"Matt, listen," the other nodded with a smirk. "Before I tell you anything, I need to know you're on board. I can't have you interfering with my mission in this city."

"Well that's just a risk you're going to have to take, Stick. You know my rules. Take them or leave them."

The old, battle-hardened veteran's shoulders sagged. "For the story I'm about to tell you, Matt, trust me, you're going to want a beer."

* * *

The pristinely polished, shiny black stretch limousine was hardly Ben McLain's preferred method of discreet and maneuverable transportation, but given the client, the sharpshooter decided it best not to lodge any formal complaints. The limousine glided noiselessly into the motor pool of the uptown, high-rise, luxury corporate penthouse apartments at 80 Columbus Circle, Upper West Side, and a moment later the rear door was opened for him by a well-groomed manservant with a crew cut and a jawline so square it was like staring at a recruiting poster for the United States Marine Corps. As McLain got out of the car and headed up the main steps for the lobby, the attendant put his hand up to his earpiece and radioed a confirmation that the hitman had been delivered as arranged.

Ben tried not to feel as out of place as he looked as he crossed through one of the most opulent and bourgeoisie lobbies he'd ever had the displeasure of walking through—Christ, the chandelier hanging in the ballroom probably cost more than he'd made last year—and he approached the security desk where he was instructed to pass through a metal detector. The test he failed with a broad smirk as he opened his leather jacket to reveal a number of handguns holstered in multiple sheaths both against his torso and sewn into the lining of the jacket itself. He craned his head upward in the direction of the security camera and beamed a sheepish grin at the lens. A moment later, the security personnel in the lobby were instructed by headset to allow the mercenary to pass through without removing his armaments. Ben whistled a lively, Irish reel as he headed on through toward the elevators, the security guards staring after him with hard, challenging glances.

"Penthouse level, apartment 77B," the man at the security desk called after him as McLain stepped inside the elevator box with a spring in his step.

Incidentally, the 70th floor was also the highest floor in the building, so Ben had quite a bit of time to check each of his handguns and concealed blades as the elevator car slowly ascended to the soaring tenor of Enrico Caruso as he sang the role of Faust in Arrigo Boito's _Mefistofele_. The longer he spent in the car, the more uneasy Ben began to feel. For starters, face-to-face meetings with clients while _dinner was still in the oven_ was not only extremely risky, but it violated all kinds of NSA-X protocols and regulations. And the fact that he had been allowed, armed to the teeth and after more-or-less botching a mission, to waltz right into the penthouse suite of his employer in the middle of the night was unsettling at the least, downright insane at best. As the elevator door opened up onto the 70th floor with a nonthreatening chime, McLain took a deep breath and shelved his fears and suspicions. It was highly unlikely that _The Bank_ would attempt to dispose of a high-value, National Security Agency Black-Ops Asset in the middle of downtown Manhattan.

The hallway stretched both directions with four, individual private residences on each side of the elevator. Given that he was being paid a quarter of a million dollars to murder somebody that, as far as he could tell, was as ignorant of her own position as she was harmless and insignificant meant that whosoever called this castle in the metropolitan sky home possessed a level of equity and sociopolitical capital that would utterly confound Ben's imagination at its wildest. Each door to each residence was accessed by a biometric security lock; video cameras were installed above each door to allow tenants to screen their visitors. McLain had barely stood in front of unit 77 for more than a second when the digital scanner bleeped melodically, a light somewhere flicked from red to green, and a thick, blast-proof door slowly opened inward and away from the hallway.

Drunk on a naturally-produced cocktail of endorphins, adrenaline, and instinct, Ben McLain immediately flashed his enhanced eyes across the shadowy, geometrically alchemistic planes and angles of the client's lofty sepulcher the instant he stepped inside the entryway. The fingers of both his hands absent-mindedly stroked the hammers of the handguns girdling each hip as his eyes adjusted to the dimly-lit, Mediterranean penthouse suite. There were at least a half-dozen trained, paramilitary mercenaries patrolling rounds through the apartment; many of these he could tell were a mix of ex-Mossad and Italian Special Forces Col Moschin. The guards themselves were ubiquitously outfitted with FN SCAR assault rifles and Baretta handguns and wore jet black nanocomposite, anti-ballistic stab-proof vests. Only one of these, a scrawnier man surrounded by a veritable legion of computers, monitors, wires and other electronic devices unknown to McLain, wasn't dressed or armed for all-out war.

The sprawling suite, which enjoyed a staggering view of Central Park herself, had been richly decorated with a Tuscan, somewhat medieval flare. It reminded Ben of old rustic villages in rural Italy, its sun-baked, Old World look characterized by stone patios, sturdy furnishings with elegant iron accents, terra-cotta tiles, textured wall finishes, detailed murals and trompe l'oeil designs. Contrasting with the warm, earthen hues of soil and wood shades of vibrant, olive green mimicked the tall, magnificent cypress trees that famously framed many Tuscan country roads as well as the vines of grapes, foliage and fruit of olive trees. Ben marveled at the rich ocher and deep, golden yellow that captured perfectly the colors of a Tuscan sunflower field, the ripe fruit of a lemon tree and the warm, relaxing rays of the setting Tuscan sun. The cobalt blues present in the rugs, draperies and curtains reflected the colors of sea and sky while the deep burgundy of the lamps, sofas, tables and divan conjured images of fine Italian wines.

One of the security guards waved him through the kitchen and toward the immense outdoor patio, and McLain took note of everything that could potentially be used as a weapon, from the knife rack to the wrought iron hanging cookware, the copper pans all arranged by size and type in their neat little rows, right on down to the smaller terra-cotta pots filled with herbs like basil, rosemary and oregano, adding to the lingering aroma of Italian herbs, lemons and bougainvillea that filled the apartment. Colorful, ceramic bottles filled with olive oil could be used to blind, disable or hinder mobility; even the countertop wine racks, woven strands of garlic and baskets filled with fresh vegetables could be, under the right circumstances and in the right hands, made into terrifying implements of destruction. And Ben McLain noted and filed the location and possible uses of each in less than half a minute.

Outside on the deck itself, there were large sconces in which burned great torches casting long shadows every which way. The security guard who had escorted him through the penthouse suite motioned for him to stop, and he obeyed as the mercenary left him and strode briskly over to the man in the pinstripe black suit who had his back to McLain, hands folded behind his back, staring out across the city skyline. The man who Ben assumed was the client turned his head only slightly to regard his hired muscle, then nodded and said, " _Grazie. Sarà possibile proseguire i vostri doveri._ " Then he turned around and regarded McLain.

"Thank you for coming on such short notice. I understand this entire thing is…well…for a man in _your business_ …irregular. But let me assure you it was as necessary as it was irregular."

"It seems you know quite a bit about how these things work," Ben replied, trying to sound like somehow he had the upper hand in this entire situation. "That being the case, you'd also know that I already broke a number of rules accepting this assignment in the first place. _My rules_. And now I'm breaking another. Typically, when I arrive in town, I like to get my business done quickly and quietly. Without breaking any rules. Once _dinner's ready_ , I call the contractor and we _go out to dinner_. Wire transfers are made instantaneously. We never see each other again. Everybody's happy."

The benefactor fished a cigar case out of his inner suit jacket pocket and offered a cigar to McLain, who declined. "You certain, Mr. McLain? They're Cuban. From Castro's own personal reserve."

"Bad habit. Best not to start."

The man in the suit shrugged. "We all have our bad habits. I have many vices, and smoking is indeed among them. Your bad habit is that you kill people. And like me and my smoking of cigars, you've grown exceedingly good at it over the years." The contractor fished a cigar cutter out of his left trouser pocket and snipped the end off of his cigar. He flipped open a gold-plated zippo lighter and lit the cigar. "But neither of us are going to stop now, are we? Not when there are so many cigars left to be smoked. When there are so many lives left to be taken. No, Mr. McLain, I think you and I will continue with our habits for quite some time to come."

"How did you know my name?" McLain asked, scratching the day-old auburn stubble on his chin. "We don't use names. Code words only."

The benefactor gestured around the penthouse patio deck with his arms before running his fingers through his long, wavy, silver-white hair. "Look around you, Mr. McLain. Does it look like you're in a Job Center or bread line for hitmen? A businessman doesn't get to where I am without making a lot of money and even more connections. The agency that sent you to me would give me the social security numbers of everyone even remotely related to you if I asked for them. It pays to do research about a job, wouldn't you say, Benjamin McLain? And about the people doing them?"

"What am I doing here?" the assassin wondered, starting to feel more annoyance than uncertainty.

"I paid you, Mr. McLain, for a job. Unfortunately, the job you thought you were doing was not really the job I paid you to do."

The Irish hitman stood baffled, staring confoundedly at the silver-haired contractor before him. "You paid me to shoot some stupid little Irish wannabe journo," McLain scoffed. "$250,000 upon proof of death."

The cigar embers glowed as the client mused softly to himself. "Did you really think even a man with the amount of liquid, disposable income that I possess would throw away a quarter million dollars on a woman as meaningless as Karen Page? Benjamin, Benjamin, why, I hired you to make yourself a target."

"What?" McLain shook his head with confusion. "A target? A target for whom?"

"Why, for the Devil of Hell's Kitchen, who else?" the contractor laughed. "You see, Mr. McLain, you can't put up your own castle until all the brick and mortar ruins of the former occupants are removed. With the majority of the key players removed from the equation, the only variable left to consider was this…this _horned vigilante_ that I can't stop reading about in virtually every publication I pick up in this damned city. He's the subject of discussion at every bistro, club and café in this festering cesspool of a borough. Hell, there's even a pool regarding his identity down at the police precinct. Yes, Mr. McLain, I hired you as bait, to lure him out of the shadows by putting in jeopardy the life of someone I deduced had danced with the devil, so to speak, already in the past."

"Page? But how? Why would this… _Daredevil_ guy…give a rat's ass about that woman?"

The man took a deep, crackling drag on the cigar, before turning to lean against the railing and stare off across the city once more. "The Union Allied Construction scandal…Ms. Page was accused of murder. Shortly after she was acquitted, she went to work for a small firm of upstart lawyers operating out of Hell's Kitchen—not exactly the most opportune location for headquartering a law practice if you ask me—where she also had her hands in bringing down Wilson Fisk and exposing that pompous, corpulent philistine and his corruption."

The Irish hitman walked up aside the railing and followed the contractor's gaze out over the city. He had to admit, it was a hell of a view.

"But why Karen?"

"Because she's logical choice. Her co-conspirator in the corruption exposé, Ben Urich—that reporter with the Bulletin—was already killed, and the two lawyers Nelson and Murdock have too many eyes on them both right now after the Fisk victory. But Karen Page? She's invisible. A nobody. She's got nothing to lose, but what she does have is a connection to virtually everyone involved in the Fisk business, and one of the biggest threats to Fisk and his empire from the very beginning of all this was that Devil of Hell's Kitchen. I figured it we rattled a few cages, eventually our little self-proclaimed, patron saint of the damned would rear his ugly little horned head."

"So…you used me," McLain rasped. His finger once again slid to and fro along the hammer of one of his pistols. He longed to feed this Italian piece of bourgeoisie trash a four course meal of lead with a side of explosive primer and propellant.

"I did, and you know what, I'll use you again, because this time I want you to kill the devil himself now that we know that he's not only open for business but that he obviously makes his base of operations within a five-or-so block radius of Karen Page's apartment."

"That's all guesswork," McLain retorted. "How can you be sure we didn't just get lucky?"

"Because, Mr. McLain, I don't believe in luck," the other replied with a smirk. "I don't believe in circumstance. I believe in _destiny_. And our destiny is intertwined with this devil, it seems."

"You used me once. This guy's a pretty decent fighter and doing the proper research and preparations and even dealing with this guy…just tell me why in the hell I would want to go through all this trouble? Especially with the risk being this high. With the variables so hard to control?"

"You'll do it because I've just doubled your rate. For killing the Devil of Hell's Kitchen, you will be paid a half million dollars. $500,000. And I'm good for it; even the NSA-X will vouch for that."

"What's in it for you?" Ben asked, tempted, but nevertheless suspicious. He wasn't stupid. He'd dealt with manipulative and Machiavellian cunts like this one before. He didn't plan to go down in a blaze of gunfire unnecessarily, not here, not now. Not when he was so close to his own goal that had been years in the making.

The contractor took one final, deep, satisfying drag on his cigar, then put it out on the marble stone railing. He turned to face the assassin, the wrinkles in the corners of his eyes furrowed as his gleaming eyes narrowed. "Let's just say you're going to be hearing the name _Manfredi_ a lot more often around this city," Silvio replied.


	5. Chapter 5: No More Heroes

**The Blind Leading the Blind**

 _By Caudimordax_

* * *

Matt Murdock _experienced_ the sun christen New York City with a new day from upon the old wooden bench outside the Cathedral of St. Patrick's. To Daredevil, listening to the break of day breathe life into the sleeping colossus of the Big Apple was like hearing an orchestra tune up. At first, like the whispered falsettos of flutes and oboes, the last melancholy chirrups of neighborhood warblers colored the trees and the air, these songs doubtlessly their last before they were roiled south by the first snows of New England winter. Then the brass and the strings chimed in in the form of car horns blaring, police sirens whining, dogs barking and pedestrian discourse. Lastly, a steady thrum of delivery trucks, motorcycles, high heels, bicycle wheels, engines revving and impassioned shouting designated the bass and percussion. All in all, it was a beautiful display of sound, smell, taste and metaphysical texture that comprised the intensely synesthetic world in which he lived. And he couldn't imagine living anywhere else. New York City had become an extension of himself, Hell's Kitchen his very beating heart.

It nearly caught Murdock by surprise when Father Lantom, wrapped in a slate gray woolen trench, sat quietly beside him, occupying the space between with a foam board tray holding two lidded paper cups Matt deduced were _to-go_ lattes responsible for the repellent odors of alkaline, wet cardboard and mysterious chemicals assailing his nostrils. The corner of Murdock's mouth twitched momentarily into a sneer reflecting something half way between relief and irritation. Matt waited, expecting the old priest to engage his parishioner as always, but the man instead took one of the cups from the tray, cracked open the hole in the lid, and sipped his latte. Daredevil whispered a chuckle and shook his head.

"Other one's for you," Lantom said, smacking his lips.

"Starbucks, father?" Murdock teased, one eyebrow bowed. "For a man of both bean and cloth such as yourself, isn't that sacrilege?"

Lantom scoffed and curled his lip. "It's colder than the hinges of Hell, Matthew, and I'm an old man. Every once in a while we break a rule to make the trials and tribulations of our lives just a wee bit easier to bear."

"Even agents of God?" said Matt.

" _Especially_ agents of God," Lantom replied with a wry chuckle. "Ours is a dangerous and tasking road, Matthew. Beset on all sets by the iniquity of evil and desperate men. Challenged at every turn by things like modern science and medical academia. Not a single day passes that we aren't embroiled in one sort of battle or another, whether it's one of logic and reason or one of conscience and soul. Every battle is equally valid and hauntingly complex. But…" his eyes shifted to Murdock. "…the call to those battles is irresistible; it is a whisper in the very ear of our heart (he tapped his chest), sounding from a truly unknowable place in the deepest abyss of our psyches, and so we go on fighting with every breath in our bodies. And sometimes, well, when you're busy fighting the good fight, you've got neither the patience nor a pair of slippers warm enough to bother will brewing the good stuff at a quarter to eight in the morning." Lantom's brow furrowed suddenly. "Speaking of a quarter to eight in the morning, it's rare I see you here so early. What're you doing here anyway, Matthew? Eight o'clock on a Tuesday morning? I'd have thought you'd be preparing for a big court case or something."

Murdock's smile faded. "I've…I've decided to take a vacation," Matt lied.

Lantom took another sip of his cheap, watered-down latte. "Sure looks like it."

"I'm just taking some time off."

"Well, Mr. Murdock, there are literally hundreds of park benches throughout Hell's Kitchen alone, and yet you find yourself—on vacation—ending up right here in front of my parish. If it's not the java you're after, maybe it's the banter."

Matt shook his head. "It's… it's just…quiet…here."

Father Lantom shrugged his shoulders. "Uh huh. Matt, if I can hear that Hindi music trumpeting out of that newspaper kiosk at the end of the block, I'm fairly sure you can too. If you don't want to talk to a priest, how about talking with a lonely old man?"

Murdock tilted his head. "The loneliness of your vocation finally settling in after all these years, father?"

The other sighed. "Insofar as I can always talk to Him, no, I'm not really lonely, per se. But human connection is important, Matthew. It's why God gave us language, the ability to communicate, and the ability to love in the first place. It's one of the quintessential things that makes us human. Without it…well…we'd all just be stumbling around blindly in the dark, groping for something to hold onto."

Matt cracked a cynical smirk. "Cute," he said.

"I mean no disrespect," Lantom continued. "Matthew, I know what you do, and as I've said before, I don't know exactly how you do…whatever it is that you…do… Maybe it's a gift from God himself. Maybe it's some sort of… _crazy_ scientific breakthrough. A miracle of human biology. I really don't know. I'm not going to try to talk you out of it either—heh, being a priest is not much different than being a salesman, and when you're in sales, you learn to spot when somebody's already got their mind made up—but Matthew, I do think it's fair to remind you that while you're out there fighting, you should occasionally pause to remember exactly _what_ it is you're fighting for. Are you fighting for justice? For whatever personal framework of morality you envision this city adopting as a result of your efforts? Or are you fighting for the city itself? If it's this city you're fighting, Matthew, then what you're _really_ fighting for are the people in it. Without them, all of this (he gestured around him) is just steel and glass. No, it's the people of New York you're fighting for, the people of Hell's Kitchen. Fighting to preserve the good, pure, meaningful relationships they've established with one another. Fighting to sever the corrupt and insidious connections that have been made. For the people, Matthew. For their dreams. Their microcosmic little worlds that appear and disappear day by day. And, yes, I can see how, in theory, that could be a noble undertaking. But Matthew, be absolutely sure it's for them you do these things and not yourself, because the pursuit of revenge does not end with absolution. That's the point at which you stop being a hero and start being the villain."

"Father," Murdock began quietly, "you just moments ago said that serving God is a battle, but a battle you _know_ you've got to fight. I know the feeling of which you speak. I know it _exactly_. It's something… _inextricable_ …isn't it, father? Something you can't even begin to explain…like an inner voice that you don't exactly _hear_ , but…I don't know… _feel_ …as it resonates through your soul? Calling out to you. Screaming at you that this is your calling, that you were… _born_ …to do this…and if you don't…then you might as well just…step out in front of a car while crossing the street because you'd be wasting your very life if you didn't?"

Lantom stared down at his latte. Already most of the warmth had left the beverage, and the mixture had become something of a sludgy syrup crowned by a film of cold, alchemical foam. He sighed sadly. "Matthew, sometimes, being a hero doesn't mean having the courage to rise to what we believe is our calling or our destiny; indeed, if the people we love and the people that love us are in imperiled by our actions and our deeds, sometimes being a hero means having the courage not to."

Murdock snorted, and even though his sightless eyes were completely obscured by his opaque lenses, he looked away. "I…I can't do that," he said stubbornly. "I never asked for anybody's love. Not for their friendship. Not for their support or encouragement or their belief. They get hurt because they get involved with me, even when I explicitly warn them of the dangers."

"But Matthew, if you don't want to make connections with anybody then what are you trying to save? Who are you trying to save?"

"These… _people_ …the filth of this city…the drug dealers, the pimps, the loan sharks, fiends, fraudsters, hucksters, thugs, mafiosos and corrupt politicians…if I can drag enough of them through a court room and due process… put enough of them behind bars…then these evil men and women will be too afraid to perpetrate their evil upon this city. They'll be afraid to even _dare_ trying to take advantage of the poor, the disenfranchised and the destitute. Then, and only then, can the people of this city be truly safe."

"And if you can't? If there are simply too many of them and too few of you? Then what will you do?"

Daredevil shook his head agitatedly. "There's always somebody at the top. Somebody running the show. It's just a matter of finding out who that person is."

Lantom fitted his now-iced latte back in the foam tray and donned a pair of gloves before tightening his scarf around his neck, obscuring evidence of his affiliation of the church inadvertently. "Like I said, I'm not going to try to talk you out of this. I know full well that you've got quite a bit more mileage left to go on your path before you've finished, but I think you've _lost sight_ , so to speak, of one of the most fundamental elements of war."

"That is?"

"You're only one man, Matthew, and one man cannot stand before the wrath of one thousand. If you _must_ do this, you should at the very least apply some of that sterling, ivy-league education of yours and be smart about it. If you are to be the sword, Matt, then find yourself a shield. Do some damned research. You don't even know who it is you're fighting against. You used to be more prudent and strategic about these things; now you just… _rush in_ …every single night, looking for somebody to bloody your knuckles with. I would have thought your boxer father would have taught you that much. And for Heaven's sake, Matthew, _know yourself_. Never stop questioning your own beliefs. Everyone these days yammers on about how Christianity is all about knowing absolute certainties about the mythical forces that exist above and beyond our world. The reality of our faith is that on the surface it portends to hide a great secret we all initially presume is the mystery of creation and eternal life. But in reading the Bible correctly, we're taught to distinguish between fact and fiction, actuality and allegory. We see examples of men led astray, and learn that, yes indeed the road to Hell of paved with good intentions. And when it's all said and done, the ultimate irony is that the greatest secret of all had nothing to do with eternal life or the universe at all. It's about the _here_ , Matt. The _now._ It shows us the beauty of mortality, and the intrinsic importance of the fragile and ephemeral connections we make. _Know yourself_ , Matthew Murdock. Is that devil getup of yours the costume, or am I looking at your disguise right now?"

Murdock straightened his tie and adjusted his suit jacket collar anxiously. "Thanks for the chat," he said, unfolding his walking stick and rising to his feet. "No more Starbucks," he admonished him. "Those dreadful things make you borderline didactic."

"Trust me, my son, you wouldn't want to sit through one of my masses when I'm decaffeinated. Now that's truly Hell."

"Thank you, father," Matt concluded. "Stay warm."

* * *

Ben McLain began his mission anew in earnest early that morning. Leaving the executive suite paid in full by the client, he took a cab across town from the InterContinental Hotel on 44th and 8th to Karen's residence on West 46th, right across from where he had attempted the assassination the very night before. He instructed the cab driver to let him off a block away. After paying the fare, he pulled his faded leather bomber jacket over a Desert Storm-style camouflage tank top, adjusted the New York Yankees ball cap upon his head, and climbed out of the cab, slinging his nondescript, black messenger bag over his shoulder and tapped the top of the car twice thanking the driver once more. He fished a pack of Winston cigarettes out of his jacket pocket, flipped open a chrome-plated zippo and lit it while he reviewed his action plan in his head.

He spotted the cops camping the entrance to the apartment building less than twenty paces after he'd left the cab one block away. His augmented eyes as well as extensive military training gathered intelligence systematically and instantaneously;

 _Man and woman team. The man, black male, approximately 210 pounds, six feet tall, body language and weight distribution suggests moderate physical conditioning, limited but existent combat training, has likely fired his gun a few times, mostly at the range. Lip read reveals bilingual ability in English and Spanish. Woman, Asian female, approximately 115 pounds, five feet three or four...definitely a recruit—nervous and uncertain affectations. Both officers in possession of Glock 19s. Guy cop questioning old man on front stoop. Divert attention. Bike messenger turned onto 46_ _th_ _one block away. Will be parallel with trajectory of white painting van crawling through crosstown traffic in twenty-seven seconds._

Roughly fifty-five feet away from Karen's apartment building, Ben McLain veered quickly off the sidewalk and into a tiny alley that was more of a crevasse or aperture between two buildings than a bylane, pulled out his signature Smith & Wesson SD9 VE semi-automatic 9mm chrome-plated pistol and attached a suppressor to the end of it. Then he waited.

Sergeant Brett Mahoney nearly evacuated his bowels when the relative quietude of a golden New York City November morning was disturbed by the eruption of a vehicle tire and the ensuing uproar that followed: tires screeched, horns blared, voices gasped and screamed alike, glass shattered and something thudded and skidded on asphalt. The two police officers immediately abandoned what they had been doing and ran to the edge of the street to find that the front right tire of a commercial painting van had inexplicably exploded causing its driver to swerve into a passing cyclist sending him catapulting, head over handlebars, onto the street and into a mountain of stacked newspapers. McLain used the distraction to slip inside the apartment, tossing the old man the cop had been questioning a shiny half-dollar coin as he passed with a sly wink and a tip of his cap.

To his surprise, the lobby was vacant except for a half-asleep, mangy-looking tabby cat who occupied the premises with ignominious neutrality alongside the human tenants, glutting upon the leavings and arbitrary generosity of the old, the lonely, and the juvenile. An ancient, tri-bladed fan glided round and round with the languid malaise of a sailboat without wind above where the worn copper and brass P.O. boxes were installed. Somewhere he could distantly make out the muffled tenor of a loud television somewhere on the second floor. Ignoring the elevator, he pushed his way into the stairwell, adjusted his jacket collar, then checked the magazine of his pistol just to be double sure. Satisfied, he ascended the stairs two by two, the television program becoming louder as he passed the second floor. At that level he could just barely make out additional bits and pieces of other conversations. What he was listening for was the crackle of police radios or official sounding banter. But there was nothing.

At the third floor, he slowed his pace, moving slowly, quietly, and purposefully down the corridor. The police tape affixed across the door clearly demarcated Karen Page's apartment. Ben became somewhat disgruntled that the police had already begun sniffing about; from the vantage point at which he'd fired the sniper rifle, he'd figured it would have taken _New York's finest_ at least a little longer to figure out exactly _what_ had in fact transpired in the apartment that night. Truth be told, Ben McLain didn't know much more than he figured the police did. After being interrupted by this Daredevil character in the middle of a corporate-class assassination job, he hadn't been able to follow up on what had actually become of his original mission target. What he did know is that she was somehow connected to Wilson Fisk, and, by proxy, if she was connected to Fisk, she was connected to the Devil of Hell's Kitchen. He just had to figure out how. _Why was Karen Page so important_? So important that Daredevil would show up to protect her from being murdered.

It was a question that would have to wait. After ripping down the crime scene tape, he looked both ways cautiously before kneeling down and producing a lock pick. Just as he was about to go to work, he froze. Adrenaline flooded through him as his natural fight-or-flight responses kicked in. Instantly he possessed a heightened sense of things. His ears went ice cold to the touch while his cheeks and neck became flush hot. Colors brightened as his pupils dilated. He inhaled sharply. _This lock has already been picked_.

He was still digesting the realization that he hadn't been the first to breach Karen Page's door without a key even after his body went into auto-pilot. He slowly pushed the door open, still remaining in a crouch position and pinning himself, shoulder first, to the side of the doorway, his silenced pistol aimed directly over the forearm of his other hand. Thankfully, the apartment door gave with only the tiniest squeak. The television from the second floor had become muted to the point of intelligibility. If dust could make noise, Ben McLain would have heard it as it swirled up and off the floor when the door opened. Even in the dim light of Karen's flat, McLain could see clear as day.

The assassin rose to his feet, then crept slowly into the apartment, shutting the door quietly behind himself. His gun was still aimed in front of him, unflinchingly. His cybernetic eyes flitted about, reading every plane, angle and vector of the room in front of him. The layout didn't offer very much cover, but it prevented multiple assailants from attempting to converge upon him at once in the event of an ambush, forcing them to come at best in pairs of two. McLain scanned and cleared each room with the patience and diligence of a Navy Seal until he reached the window where he'd shot Foggy Nelson the night before. With his offhand, he gently fingered the fractured shards of glass that still remained in the frame after several high caliber slugs had passed through it not long ago. In so doing, he was off guard long enough that by the time the shadow entered his peripheral vision, two, tiny black blades had buried themselves somewhere along the back of his right shoulder.

At first, Ben McLain couldn't be certain if what he was seeing was real. His shock translated into an extra three seconds of disbelief during which time he used an end table as a wooden shield to absorb more of the blades arcing through the air directly toward him at terrifying speeds. His composure regained, the assassin instantly raised his handgun and executed the _ninja_ garbed entirely in crimson drapery rushing toward him with a sword. _A goddamn sword_. The first two bullets entered the attacker's chest while the second, following only a single beat behind the first, completed the combo by burying itself in the ninja's masked forehead. As the man collapsed, McLain's arm arced wide to resign the second assailant to a similar fate, but the staff weapon he was carrying gave him vastly superior reach and he deftly whacked the gun directly out of McLain's hands. The force of the strike was so sudden and deliberate that Ben nearly felt his wrists snap, and he yelped in pain as he barely had the time to recover before a swift snap kick thundered into his abdomen.

McLain reeled backwards and fell against the broken glass of the window causing more to shatter to the floor. As two more ninjas flew toward him on the invisible wings of years of dedicated martial arts instruction and practice, he picked up the closest and most deadly-looking blade of glass by where he sat and leapt forward, catching the nearest of the attackers by surprise as he caught his quarterstaff with one hand and opened the ninja's throat with the improvised glass dagger in the other. Even though the enemy wore red, McLain's eyes could still see the blood as it gushed into the wound fabric of their crimson uniforms.

The third ninja was barely a second behind his cohort, barely giving Ben the second he needed to recover his pistol from the floor beside him. His weapon, a sickle-looking thing attached to some dastardly-looking chain, launched his small, lithe body into an aerial spin giving his weapon the torque it needed to arc toward him and catch him with a deep cut to the rib cage. McLain cursed loudly, nearly the last thing to leave his mouth as he barely ducked out of the way of a follow-up blow intent on lobotomizing him. The assassin swiftly grabbed the chain of the weapon and pulled the ninja toward him, catching the fighter off balance. McLain emptied one bullet into each of the assailant's kneecaps as he lurched forward, causing the man to shriek in pain and fall to his ruined knees in front of him, incapacitated. Ben squeezed off two more rounds almost instantaneously, one into each of the ninja's shoulder joints then reached forward and grabbed the man's mask as he began to pitch backward, pulling him upright and steadying him once more. He looked from one to the other of the remaining two ninjas, the muzzle of his firearm pressed against their ally's forehead. Though they remained in combat stances, their expressions seemed less certain of their superiority. McLain's eyes narrowed as his mouth crooked into a smirk. He depressed the trigger on his weapon once more, and a bullet left the muzzle and found its way through the ninja's forehead.

McLain jumped and somersaulted beneath Karen's dining room table as more ninja daggers whizzed through the air after him. These fuckers weren't easily intimidated by conventional firearms, he realized, as he unleashed covering fire over his head while trying to get to the only real projectile protection in the room—the sofa. He fired a few more shots to pin down the ninjas, but even this didn't hamper their efforts as he took a few more knives in his back and legs and one in his left elbow in the process of making it to the couch.

"Fucking hell!" he screamed as he ejected the magazine from his pistol and inserted another. As he snapped the magazine into the gun, he felt something simultaneously frigid cold and blistering like a viper's sting in his pectoral just below his clavicle. And realized that one of the ninjas was already atop him, his sword already buried in McLain's chest.

The assassin screamed in pain, kicking up his foot and causing the ninja to lose his balance and stumble forward, his grip on the katana lost to him. McLain quickly took the ninja's head in each hand and gouged his thumbs into the only visible feature of his face—his eyes. He buried his strong, trigger-calloused fingers deep into the warm, gooey sockets of what had formerly accommodated the coal-black peepers of the costumed killer. Now it was the ninja's turn to howl, which he did, a bloodcurdlingly shrill shriek of pure agony, surprise and fear. Ben fired three shots into the ninja's abdomen, then another right between where his eyes had been. He was tactical, he reasoned, not cruel.

The last of the _sanguine samurai_ that had engaged him came at the assassin with renewed vigor and purpose. Neither of these would prove enough, however, as even artisan-folded steel in the hands of the finest swordsman in the world cannot stand before the bullet storm unleashed by a man, his pistol, and the promise of a $500,000. And with a loaded gun, at this range, Ben McLain could have shot the wings off the fleas of an Irish wolfhound on St. Patrick's Day. McLain snapped off a few quick shots, each of them non-fatal but nevertheless disarming and disabling the red warrior. The Irishman sighed deeply as the ninja writhed on the floor groaning, and he rose to his feet slowly, brushing himself off before checking the wound at his side.

"You fucking pricks," he muttered to himself. "Gonna need stitches for this fucker."

As he walked over to the only ninja still alive, he rechecked his current magazine again for good measure. He knelt over his fallen adversary and straddled his torso before decking the man square in the face. The ninja hemorrhaged a fountain of blood through his mask.

"Who?" he asked. He waited. There was no reply. He struck the man again.

"Who?"

Silence.

More blood.

"Who? Who sent you?"

Some gurgling now. He'd lost some teeth for sure.

"Fuckin' who sent you? Make it easy on yourself. I'll make this whole affair quick and easy."

Nothing.

McLain smashed his fist into the ninja's face three more times, effectively ruining the man's nose if not his entire day and nearly dislocating his jaw.

"Look, pal, you might be one of the tough guys amongst your buddies, but that shit doesn't matter anymore." He made a broad sweeping gesture around the apartment with his arm and snickered. "Eventually, I'm gonna find one of you pricks, and I'm gonna beat him to within an inch of his life. And he isn't gonna be the big tough guy you are, and when I break him _juuuuust_ enough, you can fucking bet he'll tell me everything I want to know. You fuckin' hear me down there you little coin slot, Chinkerbell motherfucker? I don't have all damn day! You're gonna start talkin' now and I'll let you check out early like the generous world class hitman that I am, alright?"

Through the choking and the sputtering on his own blood and severed tissue, the ninja began to laugh softly. McLain pressed the muzzle of his pistol to the ninja's forehead.

"What's so fuckin' funny?"

"You," the ninja chuckled before coughing and wheezing again. "You will get nothing from me because I know nothing. And you will not muscle the answers out of another one of us."

"Oh yeah?" McLain pushed his gun more firmly against the ninja's skull. "Why's that?"

The ninja suddenly reached forward and placed both his hands around Ben's. "Because you are already dead," he answered cryptically before suddenly slipping his slender finger inside the trigger guard of the gun Ben was pressing to his skull and squeezing the trigger, discharging a silenced round into his brain.

* * *

Wilson Fisk sat silently on a bench in what passed for _outside_ at Rikers, squinting up at the first daylight he'd seen since his release from solitary confinement after it had been eventually determined by both security cameras and prison guards that the Kingpin had been acting entirely in self-defense. He puffed deeply upon the _Kool_ cigarette he'd won earlier in a game of cards. The tobacco was completely tasteless and without moisture, but it was deliriously refreshing and calmed his nerves nonetheless. He didn't even smoke; it was a vocation he would take up, from time to time, whenever things became less logically cerebral and more emotionally abstruse. Wilson wasn't exactly renowned for possessing an incredibly refined set of social skills—a fact which Fisk himself freely admitted—and indulgences, the Kingpin staunchly believed, were not only the hallmark of the enterprising and successful, but were their very birthright and reward for their accomplishments.

"Ten minutes," one of the _yard dogs_ , as they were colloquially known, yelled out in a gruff voice that betrayed his displeasure with the nip in the air.

The Kingpin turned to the petite, frightfully gaunt man with the round spectacles sitting beside him. "We don't have much time," he whispered softly.

" _All_ we have is time," the skeletal prisoner chided. "Why did you ask to speak to me?"

"Because I've…because I've heard that…that you're the man to speak to when you…when you _need_ something…on the inside," Fisk replied.

The man fixed his spectacles firmly upon the bridge of his nose. "There are many men such as this."

"Most men cannot be trusted," Wilson countered.

"You've been in here less than a week, fish, what makes you think I can be trusted?"

Fisk folded his enormous arms across his barrel chest. "It is…my understanding that…you and I may both know certain individuals who travel in the same circles…"

The gaunt prisoner folded one leg over the other and produced his own cigarette, a small book of matches, and joined Fisk for a smoke. "I know a great many people," he said evasively.

"You used to," Fisk began, looking increasingly uncomfortable as he continued on, "… _arrange favors_ …for a certain esteemed colleague and friend of mine."

"Yes, and who, pray tell, is this esteemed colleague who you claim that I…as you put it… _arranged favors_ for?"

"You know a man named Leland Owlsley," Fisk hissed quickly under his breath, rocking forward and backward slightly on the bench. "Owlsley worked for me for…well…for quite some time. But I was not his only client. He had many others. Others with…let's just say…exotic and illegal predilections. You, _Mr. Toomes_ , are a facilitator and a provider of those predilections."

The angular-featured old man fixed his intense green eyes upon Fisk. "What is it, exactly, that you believe I can do for you, Mr. Fisk?" he asked, casting all games of ambiguity and pretense aside. "As you can see, circumstances as they are, my powers as a provisioner are momentarily limited."

"I need…I need something smuggled in for me," the Kingpin whispered as softly as a man with lungs as large as his own could manage.

"Be more specific."

"I need a cellphone with service to reach contacts outside."

The prisoner named Toomes gave a dry, raspy cackle. "Clearly, Owlsley told you I had the Christ-like ability to work miracles."

Wilson frowned and balled his hands into fists multiple times irritably. "Five minutes," the guard called out.

"Look, it could even be a prepaid phone," the Kingpin went on. "This is very important. I can pay you whatever you want, I—"

The gaunt old man placed a tiny hand upon Fisk's giant paw softly. "Where do you think you are?" he asked Wilson. "This isn't some two-bit, hack-job, ramshackle little pig shack in some backwater, Podunk town. This is _The Cellar_ , my friend. It has some of the most sophisticated security protocols on the East Coast. The computer systems and screening devices are state of the art—all of them contractually provided by Stark Industries."

"So…so you're saying you can't do it," Fisk sighed morosely.

"Did I say that?" Toomes replied, taking a long, crackling drag on his smoke. "It won't be easy, and it might take time. I'd have to call in some steep favors—"

"How much?" the Kingpin cut the prisoner off.

Toomes smiled impishly. "I, too, am well-informed, Mr. Fisk, and it is my understanding that you are perhaps as well-connected as I."

"Go on…"

"I am quite certain that in your many dealings throughout this city, you have come in contact with New York's gallery of local celebrities, debutantes, philanthropists and eccentric billionaires."

"I have…"

"Then I'm just going to go ahead and assume that you've rubbed shoulders with executives from the Stark Corporation before."

Wilson's calculating eyes shrank into tiny black dots of suspicion and wonder. "Of course. What of them?"

"Well it turns out that they have something I want," the prisoner replied. "Something that belongs to me, in fact. Steal it for me, and I'll get you a phone."

"Now it's _you_ who must think that _I_ can work miracles. Even if I wasn't locked up in here, do I _look_ like the thief type to you?"

The other man laughed and shook his head. "You won't be going anywhere near that building, Mr. Fisk. But I know you _can_ get somebody inside. Someone who can attach a USB drive to a computer server. And that is virtually all that would be required of whatever spy or agent or whatever the nomenclature is these days you send in there. Do we have an understanding?"

Fisk chewed it over in his head, barely aware of the one-minute barking of the yard dogs. He needed a way to contact the outside. Until his counsel and executive management team arrived in force, he was on his own, and he couldn't trust those money-obsessed suits anyway. The only person left alive he could trust implicitly was Vanessa. And he had to get to her at all costs. He had to stop Manfredi and whatever devilish and vile plans he had for Hell's Kitchen. He had to find out who killed Wesley and exact the most terrible vengeance he had ever exacted. And he needed to kill the Devil of Hell's Kitchen. It was a journey of a million miles, and the first step began with a cell phone. He extended his arm to Toomes like the true businessman that he was.

"It's a deal," Fisk asserted coldly.


	6. Chapter 6: Hand Over Fist

**Hand Over Fist**

 _By Caudimordax_

At 10:58 in the early afternoon of a joylessly frosty, New York Tuesday, a 1994 Toyota HiAce commercial van rolled to a stop outside the Durant-Murakami Bank at 837 8th Avenue. The van was undecidedly olive or gray, so undividedly besmirched by the crud and grime of Hell's Kitchen that its windowless body looked like little more than a vestigial excrescence of the city's concrete. A moment after the commercial vehicle came to a full stop beside the curb, the back doors opened and a trio of men wearing municipal construction jumpsuits clambered out and set to work setting up traffic cones around the van. They were joined by two more from the front of the vehicle before the quintet ascended the broad marble steps to the bank in unison.

Inside the bank, Marci glared down at her watch with what could have been a scowl were it not mitigated greatly by her theatrical insouciance toward a mildly annoying situation her main squeeze, Franklin Nelson, had finagled her into. She rolled her eyes for Foggy's benefit before lobbing a vocal gripe in his direction while they waited in a long line to speak to a banker.

"Yeah, so, tell me just _one more time_ why we're waiting in line at the busiest banking time of the goddamn day surrounded by undeodorized, impoverished plebes when Neiman Marcus is having a blowout sale hardly two blocks up the street?"

Foggy sighed wearily. "Look, Marci, really? Do we have to go through this again? Despite all the money that our scant clients, Karen, me—hell, _even you_ —poured into Nelson & Murdock's corporate accounts, we can still _barely_ , and by Thor and Loki both, I mean _barely_ keep the lights on. Karen can't make heads or tails of where all the money's going, and I have some suspicions, and we're here today to prove my suspicions right."

"Franklin, honey, I get all that crap. I'm not one of these 'basic bitches' (she air-quoted the term) you seem so into these days." Marci shot him a look of disappointment and pity before continuing. "The part I just can't seem to wrap my pretty little head around is why on earth I'm here with you taking part in your Baker Street hijinks."

Running his sweaty palms through his stringy, matted hair, Nelson replied without a moment's hesitation, "You're here because when it comes time to talk to the banker about Matt's personal account that I haven't the access to, you've got to tuck in your arms and squeeze those oh-so-glorious breasts of yours together so that he'll let us peak at the files."

Foggy's friend with benefits frowned and crossed her arms across her ample chest. Though she looked smart and professional in her midnight blue Armani Collezioni double wool crepe blazer, the horizontal chevron, cappuccino white tank top beneath it revealed enough of her natural endowments that oftentimes, Marci didn't even need her gift of gab to be persuasive.

"You know, I should be offended," she quipped, "but I'm not. In fact, I think it's refreshingly sexy that you do, on occasion, think of me as little more than a sex object. But why I'm mad, my frumpy little Nel-Nel, is that you think you can just pimp me out to these brokers without opening negotiations with the Firm of Marci first. In other words, you're gonna owe me big for this one, Franklin Nelson."

"Fine, fine," Foggy said. "But c'mon, cut me some slack. In less than a week I've been shot, shot at, maimed, injured, broken…"

"Awwww, shhhh shhhh shhhh, my poor baby, come here," Marci mocked, taking him into the cradle of her arms. "I know you've been a superhero this week, saving Little Miss Wannabe Katie Couric over there from an assassin's bullet and…erm…and whatever…else…it is that you, um, had happen to you in the last few, and that's why I'm going to put up with this little ploy of yours. But I hope you know that you're going to put the kibosh on any plans you might have had for the night because I'm going to fuck your brains out all night long until I can't cum anymore while we listen to the dulcet tones of Mary J. Blige."

Nelson shuddered, the blood draining from his place. "Please, I beg of you, not the dulcet tones of Mary J. Blige."

Marci was about to retort when the deafening crackle of gunfire rang out throughout the bank. The cadre of municipal workers had taken up strategic positions in the main lobby of the Durant-Murakami Bank and were brandishing Zavastra M21s and demonstrating they were not hesitant to discharge them. This was followed by a deafening roar of screaming and shouting and what amounted to a cavalry charge of footfalls through the resonant, vaulted chamber of the foyer. A bank security guard lay in a pool of his own blood by the steps to the entryway where one of the gunmen had secured the doors with a high-tech-looking locking mechanism about the size of a shield and was now pointing the barrel of his assault rifle at the bank's patrons who had elected to flee. The leader of the assault team jumped up atop the circular countertop in the center of the dais and squeezed off a few rounds before bellowing out in a thick, vaguely European accent, "Be silent! Be still!"

Two more bank patrons would be shot before the leader's message fell upon the more rational ears of those who found it best to cower on the floor in silence. While the leader continued to speak, his men rounded up the bank tellers from behind the counter and herded the remainder of the bank employees out from within their glossy offices and beeping cubicles and onto the floor forming a terrified, huddled mass of steam-pressed suits and freshly-laundered skirts.

"Be silent, ladies and gentlemen. Ladies and gentlemen, I must ask you all to be absolutely silent. Absolutely still. This does not have to be an unpleasant affair, no, not in the very slightest. Do exactly as you are told, and your lives will not be threatened. Once we have what we want, we will leave, and you can go home and tell your families about the exciting, action-packed day you had." The leader shrugged. "Try to be a hero, and you can go home in a bag. The bodies of the people around you should make clear enough to you that I mean it when I tell you that we have many guns and plenty of ammunition, and if you try to hinder me and my men in any conceivable way, you will be shot in the fucking head."

"Holy shit, are we being robbed?" Foggy hissed quietly to Marci who squatted beside him with her hands atop her head.

"It certainly looks that way, doesn't it?" she scowled in earnest.

A moment later, one of the gunmen returned from the back offices and whistled to the leader. He spoke in a language unknown to Foggy and Marci both.

[I'm all set up here,] the soldier said gruffly in dialectal Serbian.

[Fine,] the leader replied, then whistled to one of the other men who took his place as he leapt off the counter. [If they even move, shoot them,] he instructed his subordinate.

The man leveled the barrel of his gun at the cowering bank patrons closest to him, eliciting a few muffled gasps and cries. The leader followed the other gunman into the back of the bank.

* * *

The Feudal Japan era Buddhist garden atop the roof of the Tokeii Building in uptown Manhattan offered a certain degree of absolute spiritual repose that could be found, as far as Fuyutsuki Akimasa was concerned, nowhere else in the city of New York. Since emigrating to America as a company employee, he had spent a year shy of three decades with the Murakami Holdings Company's American division which was, in truth, a mere appendage of the much more vast Harada Group responsible for managing all the Yakuza operations along the East Coast. Only ten of those years, however, had he been granted access to the rooftop gardens of the Tokeii Building where he had labored dually as a chief financial coordinator of both New York-based Murakami banks and as treasurer for the Yakuza's Atlantic wing for thirty years. Though he had once resented and even detested his American posting and removal from his native shores of Japan, his youthful distaste of Western society eventually mellowed with the temperance of age, and he grew remarkably fond of the strange, secret juxtaposition of ancient Japanese spirit amidst modern uptown Manhattan. The four hundred year old wooden planks and beams creaked in the midday breeze hundreds of stories above the street level where the noise of the petty rabble below was swallowed up by an endless blue horizon and the spears of steel and glass rising to meet it. A koi pond gurgled serenely, reflecting the images of the numerous colorful lanterns and paper charms fluttering from Sakura trees transplanted from his very homeland framing the garden. The garden, being of the _karesansui_ or stone garden variety, seemed impervious to the lofty winds, the neatly combed rows and ridges through sand, flowing as effortlessly as water round rock, bent around jet black, smooth, ovular stones. Here there was peace. Tranquility. A place to reflect. To forget.

"Sir?"

He hadn't heard the younger man behind him the first time, but the messenger was far too polite to address the lapse of attention. The young man simply cleared his throat and repeated himself. Akimasa turned slowly and curiously, as if roused from a long-forgotten dream. "Yes?"

"Sir, you have a private call. There's been an incident."

"A call? From who? What sort of incident?"

"Sir, if you'd please come with me to a secure line, I can patch you through."

The elderly Japanese man stared at the Sakura blossoms as they, as if plucked by an appetent young maiden eager to glean the secrets of a boy's heart, fluttered and danced to float gently atop the placid surface of the koi pond. "Bring me a satellite phone."

"Yes sir," the other nodded before saying something into his Bluetooth headset. Half a minute later, a second man opened the door to the garden and brought a satellite phone to the first. The second man bowed deeply before the first who replied with a shallower nod before walking over to the chairman. He pressed a few buttons on the phone, then handed it to Akimasa. "It will click three times, then you're patched through."

Akimasa nodded, pressing the 1980's-era, brick-sized phone to his ear. It was the price one paid for the level of encryption he required. Just as the younger aide said, there were three, muted clicks, then a voice started.

[Fuyutsuki-san], the voice said in Japanese.

[Speaking.]

[My name is Kitase Shinichiro. I'm the head of Murakami's I.T. division. Joining us for this call are Vice Chairman of Accounting and Finance Endo Mitsuru and Director of Bank Security Keito Kobayashi.]

[Hello, gentlemen.]

[The purpose of this call, Fuyutsuki-san, is to alert you that three Murakami Banks in the greater New York City metropolitan area are currently under attack.]

Akimasa's brow twitched slightly, his mouth drawn into a tight, horizontal slit. [A robbery?]

[Unclear at this time,] Shinichiro replied matter-of-factly. [At least, it does not appear to be a heist in the traditional sense.]

Fuyutsuki cleared his throat. [Meaning?]

It was Keito Kobayashi, the Director of Bank Security's turn to speak. [According to our information, all three of our biggest banks in New York City were attacked at approximately 11 o'clock this morning.]

[Which branches?] Akimasa interjected quickly.

[Bank numbers 39, 53, and 111.]

Fuyutsuki was silent for several long moments while his mind digested the information. [Branch number 111,] he said grimly.

[Exactly right, sir,] Shinichiro continued. [The significance of that number is known to very few, but everyone involved in this conversation is aware that our Hell's Kitchen branch is particularly unique for one very special reason.]

[So far, the criminals have not asked for any currency or cash that we know of. But at 11:27 we received a system alert that an attempt to electronically access the _Harada Account_ was made, without authorization, and an attack was made on the internal servers causing our financial countermeasures to become activated.]

Akimasa Fuyutsuki nodded gravely. [Then…the Harada Account is being transferred and emptied into the personal accounts of the _keyholders_ for safekeeping.]

[Yes,] Shinichiro said. [And that's where we've got a serious problem.]

[Explain.]

Endo Mitsuru spoke next. [The _keyholder protocols_ were designed, as you know, to protect the Yakuza account in the event of a threat, corporate or cyber. The three keyholders are Yakuza agents whose identities are unknown to nearly everyone within the multi-tiered architecture of the Murakami company because, at that level, everything is handled within _your_ organization, the Yakuza, internally. Whenever a top-shelf Yakuza bank gets hit, the money in the Yakuza accounts is immediately divided in three equal parts and wired to three different Yakuza agents for safekeeping until further instructions from Tokyo are forthcoming.]

[And so what is the problem?] Akimasa queried, feeling so utterly devoid of the meditative, liberating feeling he'd enjoyed only minutes earlier that he didn't know if he'd ever find inner-peace ever again.

[Well, sir, um, we've been following the computer activity from within the bank and…they have a guy in there who's _really_ good at covering his tracks, but…well…we're not so sure it's money they're after.]

* * *

"Quickly, before they go around and take everybody's cellphone like they do in movies, text off an S.O.S. to Matt," Foggy whispered to Marci, his eyes fixed upon the armed mercenaries raiding the bank as they prowled the lobby and adjacent alcoves and foyers, diligently watching everyone under their charge, occasionally pointing a gun directly in someone's face for dramatic effect.

"Are you _insane_?" Marci seethed. "What if they catch me and break my phone out of some unfairly misplaced, judgey reaction against my perceived elite white privilege?"

"Seriously? _That's_ what you're most concerned about? Your phone?"

"Foggy Nelson, have you any idea how much my phone cost? My name is laser-engraved right into the bitch. There's _rhinestones_ on the case. Actual stones, Franklin."

"Yeah, good, great. _Now fucking use your suuuuuuuper expensive phone to text a 4 letter word to Matt!_ "

"What word? 'Fuck'?"

* * *

In one of the back offices of the bank the hit squad's computer expert had patched himself together a rig teeming with wires and rack mounts and various other devices that had all the familiar signs of a black market terrorist mobile hacking station. He was a scrawny man and short, his eyes large, sunken, coal-black orbs that glimmered with the flickering light of multiple computer screens. His long, curly black hair was tied back in a tight ponytail, and he rolled a toothpick back and forth across his mouth as he typed.

[It's moving. The transfer authorization will be complete in thirty minutes. The backdoor key they gave us was good. I was able to piggyback the worm onto the algorithm that encrypts the data packets and sends them to be authorized for transfer, so we'll see exactly where it's going.]

The leader of the group lit a cigarette. "And to whom," the man said in English, taking a deep, sparkling drag. "All we have to do is keep the locks tight for another half hour. Good job, Pyotr."

The computer specialist nodded, then swatted at the air as the leader exhaled the smoke.

"You should not smoke those things," said the techie in a thickly Eastern European perversion of English. "Smoking will kill you. Do you not remember what happen to that _Man of Malboro_?"

"Staring at screens for as long as you do is no better, little brother," the leader replied with a smirk. "We're all going to die someday. Aren't you excited to learn exactly how that will be?"

Pyotr shook his scraggly head. "You'll have all the time in the world to die later. For now, we've got a job to do for some very powerful people."

* * *

Murdock sat in the still quiet of his railroad apartment upon the living room couch, hands clasped together, staring blindly out the windows at a spectacular view of the Hell's Kitchen by day he would never see. Instead, his ears, his senses, his intuition created within his mind a radiant and abstract facsimile of the world in which he lived. And today that world was a complicated one. As he reflected upon the conversation he'd had earlier that morning with Father Lantom, Matt began to sink into something of an existential malaise. After much cogitation, it had led him to a black mirror upon which was a reflection of his innermost nature. _Know yourself,_ the old priest had told him. _Is that devil getup of yours the costume, or am I looking at your disguise right now?_ In his mind, he had been stripped bare before the mirror. But it was not his naked self that was reflected back, but the devil inside. The _Daredevil_. It was true the costume he had taken to wearing had begun to feel like a second skin. Perhaps only when he donned the crimson red simulacra of a demon could he truly unchain his soul. Unleash the beast. Perhaps he was becoming more beast than man. But who would... _could_ …judge him? God? It appeared to Murdock that, as of late, Lantom's boss was taking some time off wherever Hell's Kitchen was concerned.

There was a knock at the door. Several swift, reluctant _clacks_ that sounded something like a woodpecker in a dense thicket. By the floral redolence of her perfume, the jingle of phone charms and the time between heeled footfalls up the stairs and down the hall to his door, Matt knew it was Karen long before she'd ever said a word.

"Matt? Matthew? H…hey, it's…um…it's Karen… Uh… Matt? You there?"

Nelson & Murdock's very first ever secretary knocked again, and Matt sighed. "Yeah…yeah, Karen…I'm here. The door's not locked."

Page opened the door to Matt's apartment somewhat timidly, squinting at the dimness punctuated by literally blinding spears of golden light diffusing through the window and spilling across the interior geometry of Murdock's flat. Karen adjusted the strap of her bag on her shoulder as she walked slowly into the living room. Her nose wrinkled slightly as she gazed around at the messiness and disarray of the loft, noting the multiple empty beer cans on the coffee table and the empty boxes of take-out Chinese beside them, the half-eaten microwavable dinner trays on the chaise lounge, the multiple pill bottles on the end table and the tissues and wrappings discolored by dried blood mixed in with all the rest. "Holy shit," she stuttered. "Did ya…host a frat party in here or something recently?"

Matt's eyebrow twitched almost imperceptibly, but he didn't move. "Now's not really a good time, Karen," Murdock said flatly.

"It never is," Karen replied quietly, moving aside some of the TV dinners and sitting on the very edge of the chaise lounge. She tucked a few stray locks of her golden hair behind an elfin ear. "Matt…um…I know we haven't really had a lot of time to talk about… _personal stuff_ …since Fisk and everything."

"We've all been busy."

"Right, well, I feel like since it's become patently obvious to me at least that the three of us are pretty much _always_ going to be busy, we just have to… _make time_ no matter what."

"Karen…"

"Matt, I…I've got nobody to talk to. I realize that I haven't exactly been forthcoming about things lately because…" An image of Wesley's dead, bloody face flashed through her mind and she gasped with a shiver.

Murdock sensed the sudden change in her demeanor almost immediately. "Karen?"

"We've been through a lot…and, well…I feel like we're all drifting apart and honestly, Matt, I…I really just can't be alone right now. I know it's messed up and it doesn't make sense and I can't explain it…not yet anyway…" She swallowed hard, feeling her nose tingling slightly with a prediction of tears. "I can't even talk about it yet…but…what I _need_ Matt is for somebody to promise that they'll be there when I'm ready to talk about it."

Murdock swallowed the groan he felt brewing and sighed softly instead. "Karen, you know either me or Foggy will hear you out on whatever you've got to say. We're your friends. We'll do our best to help you if we're able."

Karen made a clicking sound with her tongue against the back of her front teeth irritably. "That's not what I'm talking about! I know you're both my friends, but…" Her eyes surveyed Matt, roaming across his bare torso, lean but sculpted arms, cut abdomen and the sinewy thighs hidden beneath his slate gray sweatpants. She unthinkingly bit down on her lower lip. "I want… _need_ …to feel safe again. All I feel these days is like I'm spinning out of control. Like I can't hold onto anything anymore. Like everything and everyone I love will be torn away from me…"

Matt sat up on the couch and placed his hands on his knees. "But Karen, you know that's not true."

"Isn't it? Ben Urich. Elena Cardenas. Foggy almost died trying to safe my life. How long is it going to be before one or both of you gets killed for real, Matt? Things are getting too dangerous around here and I just don't know if I can handle it. I'm just _constantly,_ Matt, _constantly_ afraid. Afraid that I'm cursed and that I'm just going to take the rest of you down with me." And then she began to sob.

"Oh, Karen…" Murdock whispered sympathetically, rising off the couch and walking over to the chaise lounge, pushing the dinner trays off onto the floor and sitting beside Karen. He wrapped his arm gently around her shoulders, pulling her slowly and gingerly against his chest. Murdock delicately stroked the back of her head. "You're not cursed, Karen. It's perfectly normal to be afraid. And you're certainly not alone." The crying continued. "Karen, I can't help but feel like I'm largely the cause of this, and I want to remind you that you can leave Nelson & Murdock at any time and there will be no hard feelings. You can even have your job back any time you'd like, but if you're doubting your decision to remain on board after all that's happened, neither me nor Foggy will hold it against you if you decide to leave for your safety."

Karen looked up at Murdock tearfully, creating a slight distance between them. "I can't _just leave_!" she exclaimed.

"But why not?"

"Because you don't just _abandon_ the people you care about most when things get tough, Matt. I've been a lot of horrible things in my life, but I will never be the person who turned my back on my friends."

Her remark stung Matt deeply, for though the comment was not meant for his benefit, he could not help but feel the pangs of guilt resulting from the numerous dialogs he had with himself during moments of solace like the one he'd been embroiled in mere minutes ago where he'd reached the conclusion that it would simply be better for everyone, _especially his friends_ , if he'd simply disappeared entirely. If he'd had that option once, it was no longer one he could afford now that Foggy Nelson knew his secret. Now that his de facto field surgeon Claire Temple knew. His tailor Marven knew, Lantom had a general picture of the situation, and Wilson Fisk was privy to his alter ego to an absolute certainty. Karen was a mere hair's breadth away from piecing it together, and there were other players in town too that knew his identity almost as well as he did if not better. No. He couldn't afford to go off the deep end and become the devil. At least not yet. There was still much more to be done. Miles to go before he finally committed his batons and horns to a dusty old chest somewhere.

"And besides," Karen said, softly to the natural ear but deafening to Murdock, " _I…I think…there might be something else keeping me here too…"_

Murdock continued to stare directly straight ahead but his entire musculature tensed as Karen Page found his large, calloused hand in her own and guided it to the left side of her chest. "I… _know_ …you can hear it," Karen began hesitantly. "How my heart beats differently around you than it does around everyone else. But I want you to _feel_ it…so that you'll know how _real_ it is."

Despite the fact that he'd already known for quite some time that Karen Page was clearly intrigued by the notion of exploring their relationship on a more intensely personal level, Murdock was not without surprise when she placed his fingers against her warm, pale, freckled skin. Each and every one of his finely tuned, functional senses presented him with a fiery image of a heart thundering sonorously like a war drum against her ribcage, beating in excess of 90 beats per minute. The air around him was heavy with perfume and pheromones, making him experience an unexpected lightheadedness and quickening his breathing. After several long moments, she found his other hand and guided them both upward toward her head.

"We never finished this," she whispered, placing his hands and fingers upon her face, causing her to elicit a sharp intake of air as though an ancient, desperate yearning had finally been fulfilled after a lifetime of longing and self-restraint. "I…want you to…to see me," she whispered in his ear. " _All of me._ "

And just at that moment, Matt's tablet for the blind buzzed with an incoming message. A vocalization from the device accompanied the message: _SMS received from: Marci Stahl._ Karen bristled slightly.

"Matt…why is Marci texting you?"

Murdock looked suddenly crestfallen. "I…I have no idea, Karen…" he said quietly.

Karen left the chaise lounge and walked across the room to the coffee table where the tablet was resting, picked it up, swiped a finger across the screen and pressed a few times. She stood cradling the device in her arms reading the screen before her brow furrowed with confusion. "I don't get this," she said.

"What's it say?"

"Marci sent you a message saying, 'Help. Gun guys in bank.'"

Before Page had even finished her sentence, Murdock was off the divan and ran over to the table, snatching the television remote control with more precision and purpose than a keen-eyed hunter, aimed it at the flat screen television mounted on the wall outside his bedroom, and clicked.

… _with the Dow Jones and the NASDAQ on a slow but steady uptick, we can expect that investor confidence was hardly shaken in the wake of—_

Click.

… _was met with renewed accusations that he had accepted bribes from Stark lobbyists in order to support legislation that would effectively grant the company exclusivity contracts with the U.S. government as the sole purveyor of n-type fusion power in the Western Hemisph—_

Click.

… _an astonishingly well-orchestrated siege of three separate New York City banks which occurred sometime around 11 am this morning has developed into a hostage situation involving both local law enforcement, the FBI, and independent speculators. The three banks in question are incidentally three of New York's oldest banks, all three founded by the Dutch who were the original architects of the city in the early 1600s, and contain vaults which house some of the most expensive, private collections of art, jewelry, war bonds, family heirlooms, diamonds, and numerous other treasures belonging to some of the city's wealthiest and most elite families. The last time any of these banks were robbed was by the Philadelphia-born burglar and underworld kingpin, James "Old Jimmy" Hope, during the mid-19_ _th_ _century…_

Matt had already tuned the reporter on the news out. He looked directly where he perceived Karen to be with pleading, desperate eyes.

"I'm…I'm truly sorry, Karen, but I have to leave. Right now."

* * *

Akimasa Fuyutsuki strode through the lobby of the Toeii building briskly with two men in black suits on each flank, his personal retinue whenever he traveled off the property. Shinichiro Kitase followed in tow. Each and every employee, male and female alike, bowed deeply with respect as the old man power-walked toward the entryway and down the stairs to where his limousine was currently idling. One of his bodyguards, a younger man with heavily pierced ears, bleached and feathered hair, and a neck tattoo that crept out ever so slightly beyond the collar of his suit jacket, put his fingers to his ear and said, "Susanoo, this is White Spear. Kappa Unit is in transit. ETA to safehouse: thirty-five minutes."

Akimasa and his entourage entered the limousine before it pulled away from the building and was joined by three other black sedans forming a JFK-esque convoy. Inside the limo, Fuyutsuki addressed his aide more personally in the privacy of the cabin.

"Walk me through this one more time, Kitase-san," he asked of his junior grimly.

"Somehow, the robbers were able to trace which accounts our digital countermeasures divided the Harada funds into when attempts to breach the firewall and execute illegal banking orders were made. They can't access the money, but we don't think that's what they were after. By following the trail of money to the three numbered accounts, they were able to then trace those accounts to the individuals they were registered to. The three keyholders."

"So their intent was to compromise the identities of the keyholders," Akimasa surmised. "But why?"

"Yakuza keyholders are instrumental in the distribution of funding to Yakuza cells all along the East coast. If the keyholders were killed, or even captured, it could potentially deal a critical blow to East Coast Yakuza operations."

The other nodded. "Have we compiled a list of suspects? Do we have any eyes or ears inside any of the banks presently?"

"We're working on that, but some of us share a working theory."

"Continue…"

"Sir, as you know, _The Hand_ has an active cell operating here in New York City. Despite _The Keniuchio Accord._ "

Fuyutsuki studied his junior's face with a peerless level of scrutiny well-practiced over many decades of reading the micro-expressions, unconscious habits, nervous ticks and physical tells of men and women that had, in his organization, earned him the honorable sobriquet _elder_.

"The Yakuza is aware that there is an underground cell of that cult here in this city. But in over a hundred years, they have never once intervened with our affairs here in New York. They exist here because we _allow_ them to exist. To keep your eyes trained on your enemy, it is best to keep him close but not close enough that you reveal your presence to him."

"But if this is _The Hand_ 's work, then we need to be prepared to respond. Somebody's going after the keyholders with the hopes of destabilization the organization, and if it's _Hand_ , then we're going to be dragged into an extremely untimely war. The cost of such a war would be unimaginable, and doing so would simply bring more _Hand_ to New York City."

"If it is indeed _Hand_ , as you say."

"Do you suspect otherwise, sir?"

Akimasa sighed. "Our list of enemies is great, but our list of allies is greater. The Hand knows this. They would not strike so definitively unless they knew they had the power to back up their play."

"Then who?" the younger man questioned.

The elder was quiet for some time as though lost in a sudden reverie or daydream. He turned to stare out the window at the city as it passed him by. Then, a faint smile crept over his features.

"Sir?"

"Very soon, we're going to go to war hand over fist, and the streets of this city will be awash with blood as it was in the old days. I feel that the man responsible for this heist has yet to reveal himself, but it won't be long before he does. And if killing the keyholders is part of his master plan, then he is welcome to try. Many men have tried to kill me before," Akimasa chuckled wryly, clutching the strange, glowing red pendant that draped from his neck beneath his shirt. "And yet, here I sit. So let him come. And we will show him that the katana blade never dulls with time. It only thirsts with purpose. And we will be the harbinger of that purpose."

Shinichiro looked visibly unsatisfied by his senior's monolog, but he remained quiet and began to stare out the opposite window. Fuyutsuki clutched the pendant around his neck tightly. _Nobu_ , he thought to himself. _Could it truly be you?_


	7. Chapter 7: Justice is Blind

**Justice is Blind**

 _By Caudimordax_

The New York City police department had just finished locking down a five block perimeter around the Durant-Murakami Bank at 837 8th Avenue by the time Daredevil's urban aerial gymnastics landed him on the building's rooftop. Even in broad daylight, it had proven to be far easier than anticipated to reach the staging area for his daring rescue operation completely unseen—a truly remarkable feat for a renowned vigilante known for donning such visually-arresting attire. Seventeen stories of vaguely cream-colored stone rose skyward in a dramatic H-shaped configuration which provided light and air to more parts of the building but also offered far more contrasting angles and planes than a traditional rectangular tower that Daredevil could use as cover when navigating the perimeter of the edifice. A true marvel of neoclassical architectural engineering, the Durant-Murakami Bank towered ostentatiously over the crumbled projects of Hell's Kitchen with stylish aplomb, rife with _Beaux-Arts_ fanfare evident in the slightly overscaled details, bold sculptural supporting consoles, rich deep cornices, swags and sculptural enrichments in the most bravura finish the original client—Rudolph Wilhelmus Durant—could afford. What all this meant for Daredevil was a flat rooftop and a way in since it was highly unlikely that five men would be able to maintain vigil on the upper floors of the building. Additionally, with the labyrinth of skyscrapers all around him in a residential neighborhood, there would be no eyes in the sky unless the FBI decided to make the right phone calls to the right people.

Daredevil didn't even have to pick the lock to the roof's door as it had been left open by management for cigarette smoking, coffee talk and periodic cocaine usage. Once inside, he jogged to the elevator before unshouldering the small backpack he was carrying and removed a few choice items from the duffel. These included two smoke grenades, two flashbangs, an experimental ECD shotgun fitted with extended range electronic projectile taser rounds courtesy of Melvin Potter, and an old portable police scanner. Daredevil flattened the duffel bag out then placed everything on top of it inside the elevator. He loaded two experimental taser shells into the ECD shotgun, then gave it a quick shake and mumbled to himself, "This thing better work." Laying the gun down, he flipped on the police scanner and found the frequency the NYPD and the FBI were communicating on just outside the bank. He listened for several minutes to their chatter, giving him some idea how much information they had on the hostiles, where they might be located, where the police had positioned their sniper teams, where the FBI tactical unit was currently deploying, what media crews had already arrived on scene, and approximately how long he had before some bloodthirsty bigwig gave the order to breach. After listening for a couple of minutes, Daredevil was satisfied, and he grabbed the smoke grenades and pressed the 'L' button on the floor selection panel. "Going down," he smirked.

"We have it," Pyotr said triumphantly, snapping the toothpick he'd been rolling from side to side in his mouth for the past half hour. "The fund transfer achieved authorization and was executed; the trace was successful, and we have the details of the three numbered accounts where the financial data was sent. What should we do now?"

The leader of the mercenaries gave his younger brother a firm pat on the shoulder. "Send the details to the client immediately. We'll be leaving within the next five minutes."

"But Andrej," the other cautioned. "What if we send this information to the client and he doesn't hold his bargain end up?"

The mercenary leader Andrej pulled his mobile phone out of his tactical jacket, sent a quick message, then initiated the burn protocol on the device, completely wiping all contacts and stored data, before pulling the battery out of the back of the phone and tossing both into the back of the office. "First of all, Pyotr, it's 'hold up his end of the bargain'. Secondly, this client is _definitely_ good for it. Our bank account was $8 million dollars heavier as of 11 o'clock this morning. Wipe that computer of yours and your phone then join us in the lobby. You've got four minutes."

The other gunmen had been busy while their leader took care of any and all loose electronic ends. Everyone had been rounded up into two separate groups: bank employees and bank customers. Both groups waited on opposite sides of the central dais of the main auditorium while two guards walked in circles eyeing them carefully. While the bank employees still quaked with fear, the customers were growing more agitated and unruly by the minute. Marcy and Foggy stood in close proximity trying not to catch the chilling glare of the bank robbers as they prowled the perimeter.

"How long ago did you text Matt?" Franklin whispered when both guards were at the farthest points of their orbit.

Marcy smacked her lips together, then pocketed the lip gloss she'd previously been applying. "Hum, well, they took the phones about ten minutes after I sent it, then it was ten minutes after that when the hostage negotiator started trying to call the bank and using the megaphone outside. I don't know, maybe a half hour or so in total?"

"What's taking him so long?" muttered Foggy.

"Taking him so long to do what? How exactly is Matt Murdock going to get us out of this situation?"

"Matt has some really, _really_ powerful friends, Marcy," he said. "One in particular. And we could really use him right about now."

Right at that moment, one of the bank customers, a bald black man in a slate gray suit, black shirt and gold tie raised his hand and gestured at one of the passing gunmen.

"Yo, my man, over here." The gunman halted his patrol, crooked his head in wonder, then turned. "Yeah, hey, look man, my name's Desmond. Desmond Wright. Mad respect y'all comin' up in here, going all Grand Theft Auto V up in here n' shit, stealin' from all these loan sharks in business suits n' shit. Yeah, I get that shit, and that's mad tight. Y'all keep be doin' what you're doin', but I was just wondering if it might be possible if I could get something to eat, hit up the vending machines, because see, like, I'm diabetic and—"

The gunman began to walk briskly over to the man, raising the barrel of his Zevastra M21 to point the gun at him. "Don't be quiet, in minute, you will be _dead-abetic_." The mercenary glanced over at his comrade. "Good one, eh? Get it? _Diabetic. Deadabetic. You see, is 'play on words', no?_ "

At the end of the hallway lined with elevators that opened up into the grand auditorium where the hostages were being watched, the very last elevator chimed sounding the descent of its car. The third mercenary who had been guarding the entrance to the lobby turned slowly. "What the fuck?" he mumbled through his balaclava.

As the elevator car descended, each floor from the top sounding with another chime, the other mercenaries reluctantly abandoned their posts and, while still keeping their guns trained on the hostages, walked over to their comrade and stood behind him perplexed.

"Perhaps a manager from the upper floors. We did not lock down entire building."

"I think not," one of the other soldiers replied gruffly. "At this time of day, all managers are supposed to be downstairs in the offices. A rug scrubber, maybe."

"It could be virtually anyone. It doesn't matter. The bottom level is locked down. We weren't preparing for a long siege anyway. Just in and out."

"What's going on here?" Andrej said, walking out with his rifle at the ready.

"Elevator, coming down," one of the guards said.

"From what floor?"

"Top level."

The mercenary tilted his head in both directions, causing muscle to pop. "Defensive positions. When the door opens, collect the hostage. After we're done here, we're leaving. Our ride is incoming. ETA: three minutes."

The mercenaries took defensive positions behind the arches leading into the hallway. Andrej issued a final order to the hostages. "Everyone kindly get down on the floor and cover your heads. We are collecting a final hostage, then we will be on our merry way and you can all get on with your lives. Bear with us just a bit longer. Thank you for your cooperation and not behaving like imbeciles so that we had to shoot you in your fucking heads."

As the elevator slowed to the ground level, a thick, syrupy plume of smoke oozed out from within the small crevice between the elevator doors as though a hookah party was in full-swing within. This caused the gunmen to visibly tense and retrain their weapons on the elevator.

"What the fuck?" one of them whispered.

"We didn't hear the FBI say they were engaging!"

 _Ding._

With dramatic purpose, the elevators doors jolted mechanically open allowing an impossible dense haze of smoke to flood out and slowly enshroud the entire hallway in a slow-moving, eerie, almost ethereal fog.

"I can't see fuck," one of the mercenaries hissed.

"Shut up! Use your ears!"

There was a momentary chorus of safety switches disengaging. One of the gunmen squinted through a mounted ACOG on his assault rifle.

 _Silence._

"I can't see or hear anything," one of the guards whispered nervously.

Daredevil, on the other hand, could ' _see'_ and heareverything. There were five of them in total, but guarding the entrance to the bank lobby they numbered only four. By the varying distance of their heartbeats, Murdock surmised that the stray was attending to another task elsewhere and was likely not an immediate threat unless he or she was packing explosives. It was a risk he would have to take. The other four were sweating profusely; the mingled musk of sweat, cheap aftershave, the smoked meat, fish soup and feta that several of them had enjoyed several hours earlier for breakfast, and something else—something chemical…propylene glycol maybe…along with a capricious and elusive note of plum brandy, perhaps—not nearly as telling as their heightened pulses, staccato breathing, and if he strained his remaining senses to their very limits even the displacement of air molecules by their geared-up frames relative to the room around them. The mercenaries' reflexes proved lesser by comparison as well, for it took several seconds for them to realize that the spherical devices that slid out of the fog and came to rest several feet away from their respective positions were flashbangs. By the time they _did_ realize it, they were all groping helplessly at their light-seared eyes effectively becoming, for the moment, blinder than the man that came barreling out of the fog, launching himself into the fray and incapacitating them swiftly and brutally with a pair of bone-splintering combat batons.

Daredevil dispatched the two closest to him easily, taking advantage of the scant precious moments of time the flashbangs afforded him to level the playing field. With two of the mercenaries knocked unconscious, he centered himself just as the third mercenary was able to open his watering eyes wide enough to point his weapon at the fuzzy red blur directly in front of him just ten feet away. Before he could pull the trigger, however, Murdock had lowered the muzzle of the taser shotgun he'd vowed to finally field test, and squeezed the trigger. A strange, alien-sounding noise belched from within the muzzle of the gun as a flash almost as bright as the flashbang itself preceded the thud and crackle of an incredibly dense, non-lethal taser round penetrating kevlar and electrocuting the soldier beneath it, causing him to fall to the tile below him in convulsions. Daredevil stared at the gun in wonder for a brief moment before giving a satisfied nod, then swung the weapon around his back and darted around the corner.

Leaping up onto the bank countertop, Daredevil dashed after the fourth soldier presently sprinting toward the back office section of the bank, the hostile bellowing loudly in some Eastern European language that sounded to Murdock something Baltic. The man fired a few unsighted rounds carelessly over his shoulder as he darted full clip toward the general area where Matt had earlier perceived the fifth man's heartbeat to be sounding from. Daredevil flipped into the air and twisted his body, avoiding the gunfire, before landing and launching himself into a herculean sprint directly behind his assailant. A few more single-round bursts were expertly deflected with meditative precision with his combat sticks, and he converted one in a deadly projectile by sending it spinning through the air after the mercenary who took the corner just as it whirled past him. But such was Daredevil's haste that he failed to anticipate the fist that arced round the corner just as he reached the turn and made to pivot. It connected jarringly with his midsection, and though well armored, the force of the blow was such that it broke his stride completely causing him to crumple forward into a defensive somersault.

Daredevil recovered quickly, however, and it was fortunate that he did, for the Serbian mercenary leader was quickly upon him, lowering his gun at his adversary once again only to have it kicked out of the way, the last remaining bullets in the magazine wastefully discharged. The mercenary howled with frustration and brought his leg upward to deliver an axe kick, but Daredevil used a scissor takedown to bring the man to his knees. Murdock estimated that this giant European, who he put in the ballpark of six-foot-eight and nearly two hundred fifty pounds of darkly-tattooed Serbian muscle, would be better dispatched swiftly by means of the judo and grappling he'd absorbed from extensive mixed martial arts training. Daredevil attempted to force the man into a headlock, but the Serbian simply laughed and pulled Matt up and over his head down to the floor in front of him so that the masked vigilante now lay prone on his back. The mercenary clasped his hands together in a large, life-ending fist and went to bring it down against Murdock's face when Daredevil snap kicked his feet directly into the soldier's battle-scarred face.

Andrej stumbled backward and steadied himself with one of his hands, slapping an incoming fist from his masked opponent out of the way before taking another directly to the center of his face. Blood exploded from both nostrils as his nose fractured in two places; he coughed and spat out a tooth before turning back only a second later to face his opponent with a crooked smile. Murdock attempted to bring his knee up into Andrej's chest, hoping to take the wind out of the Serbian giant's proverbial sails, but the mercenary snorted mockingly and grabbed the leg instead, swinging Daredevil around and throwing him through a frosted glass wall and into the adjacent office. The mercenary didn't stick around to find out if his opponent was dead; he wiped his face and mouth on his sleeve, climbed to his knees, checked the chamber of his gun before tossing it away with a scowl, then began to jog down to the back office where his younger brother Pyotr was finishing destroying his computer and all traces of their operation that could potentially incriminate the contractor.

In the lobby with all three of their captors incapacitated, the boldest of the hostages began to make intermittent dashes for the main revolving door to the bank. Once the first couple made it successfully without being shot to death by men with guns who were no longer a variable in the equation, the slow trickle of hostages turned into a mad dash in which several of the strongest bank patrons labored to get the bizarre, shield-like locking mechanism off the main entrance. Though it took several minutes to even find the locking mechanism, their efforts were not in vain, and the device gave and fell noisily to the floor. Employees and patrons both fought to squeeze into the first round of hostages to taste freedom. A flurry of activity stirred to life the massive net of police, FBI agents, hostage negotiators, media hounds, and nearby spectators nearly spilling over perimeter fences.

Marcy and Foggy were not among them. Franklin Nelson followed Marcy begrudgingly as she trotted over to the large blue bag that had been set on the bank countertop—where all the mobile phones had been stashed by the robbers—and retrieved her personal, pocket-sized world from within. She smiled and nodded victoriously, before staring past her phone and noting the look of shock and disbelief on Foggy's face.

"What?" she said with genuine curiosity.

"Fuck, _really_ , Marcy? We came all the way back here for _that_?"

"I told you it was expensive," she said glumly. "Just imagine how pissed I'd be if one of the rhinestones had broken off."

"Ok, Marcy, listen, I want you to get out of here. Leave immediately and get somewhere safe. I'll text you as soon as I can."

"Wait, what? Where the hell do you think _you're_ going, Foggy Bear?"

"There's…look, uh, there's just something I gotta do here, still…ok?"

She stared in amazement. "…ok. And?"

"I…can't go into it right now. Look, Christ, Marcy, would you, just this once, _trust_ me? I really need you to do that for me, OK? I _promise_ , I will explain _everything_ to you later. But I just gotta do this one thing, OK? Please, for me."

Marcy nodded reluctantly. "OK," she finally assented glumly. "But don't get yourself too worked up. You promised we'd fuck tonight, remember?"

Foggy took her hands in his. "Foggy Bear doesn't break promises. He keeps them. Now go."

It took a moment for the deafening ringing caused by the falling shards of frosted glass to stop _blinding_ him, and Matt clutched his head, trying to shake off the disorientation. He groaned and clutched at his flank, fairly certain that when the mercenary leader had punched him earlier, it had dislocated (though fortunately not split) a rib. Satisfied that he was still able to absorb further physical punishment, he rose to his feet and stood in the misty silver-gold rays of afternoon light pouring in through slits in the closed blinds of the office windows. _And listened._

The two heartbeats very close to one another now, although one of them beat with a feverish tempo and at a higher, almost doe-like pitch. But it was not the worried one with whom he had just traded blows. And that was cause for concern. Murdock figured that he had, at best, two minutes to wrap up his affairs with pedestrians beginning to flee out the main revolving door to the bank before the police, FBI, or both began to pour into the bank. At which point he too would have to make a swift and decisive getaway.

He jogged quickly in the direction of the heartbeats. He could hear a magazine being loaded into an assault rifle as he reached the doorway of the rear office. In one fluid motion, Daredevil leapt through the doorway, throwing his remaining combat baton directly at the smaller of the two mercenaries. The weapon connected perfectly with a loud _clang_ as the rifle was knocked from the tremulous grip of the subordinate. Daredevil catapulted his body into the air and delivered a flying kick square into the chest of the smaller soldier sending the man tumbling backward into several bookshelves. The very instant his feet connected with ground, however, he felt an incredibly powerful vice grip close around his neck causing him to gnash his teeth together, spittle frothing upon his lips.

"I've had about enough of you meddlesome little imp," Andrej rasped. "How about I return the favor from before, eh?"

The force of the giant fist that the mercenary leader brought to bear was such that, as an antecedent to the mind-numbing pain that would follow, for the first time in nearly two decades, Matthew Murdock saw stars. A blinding whiteness accompanied the sickening crack of Daredevil's nose being snapped even through the carbon fiber lattice of the armor afforded him by his mask. Murdock gasped with disoriented shock. His neck whipped back. But the grip on his neck was firm, and his body went nowhere. Andrej's mouth twisted into a sneer. "With interest," he added, before he hit Murdock again.

When he'd been younger under the tutelage of Stick, Matt remembered one distinct conversation with his blind mentor about the age-old adage, _the bigger they are, the harder they fall_. Stick, ever the pragmatist and the realist, never embraced the sentiment. The bigger they were, he contended, the harder _you_ fell was the typical outcome. What _was_ true, Stick had drilled into him through rigorous and physically abusive and routine practice, was that generally speaking, a larger opponent, while inarguably stronger, would proportionally have a larger Achilles heel, or weakness as it were. In many cases, this weakness manifested as hubris, as had certainly been the case with Wilson Fisk. In other cases, they could be baited into a situation where their size became a disadvantage in small spaces. If the military contractor pounding the life out of him was not only this large and this strong, but this well trained, there was no conceivable way he'd ever be able to get the man to reveal his employer in under two minutes. Unless…

Murdock struggled and writhed, and finally found an opening before a fourth fist to his face would cast him into unconsciousness, punching his opponent in the throat as hard as he could without killing the man. This succeeded in freeing him from the soldier's vice grip, and he fell to the floor and barely maintained his balance. The Serbian giant's hands were occupied, now wrapped around his own throat as he gasped for air, and he could not deflect the flurry of punches that thundered into his chest, sides, and midsection in rapid succession. Daredevil punctuated this attack with a spinning roundhouse kick that caught Andrej square on the chin. And still the mercenary leader would not go down.

The battle-hardened Serbian was no stranger to pain. As a child, he'd been a gutter rat, begging for scraps or stealing food to survive on the cold and unforgiving streets of Novi Sad. At only six, he'd joined a gang. At twelve, he murdered the then-leader of the gang and took control of the operation himself until the law finally caught up with him. Several long, hard years in a juvenile detention camp had allowed him the time to reflect upon his growing legacy of misdeeds. He decided then and there that he'd been going about things all wrong, and that he would be best served murdering and butchering people legally. Hence, as a young man, Andrej was baptized in the perverse and fiery crucibles of both Bosnia and Kosovo, after which his extensive list of contacts, connections, and bank accounts bloated by the profits of numerous and highly-illegal enterprises caused him to move into the private sector and to market his particular set of skills on an international level. He'd fought much worse than the maroon maniac he was forced to wrangle with currently, and he was certain he would again. For a split second, he pondered whether the possibility did exist that his employer had paid this man to tie up loose ends and kill both he and his team once the job was done. He shook the thought from his mind. Impossible. He had, after all, an insurance policy of his own in place just in case the reputation of the client had somehow been compromised. The stakes were too high for such amateur displays of professional disrespect.

Murdock was starting to tire. The smaller soldier was starting to rouse, and his bruised and dislocated rip was swelling and was starting to become a salient irritation. Both he and the Serbian leader were covered in blood, though against Murdock's already crimson attire—per Claire's suggestion—it was far less noticeable then against the mercenary's particular shade of tactical black. Daredevil ducked out of the way of a left hook before blocking a menacing right uppercut that may very well have dislocated his jaw had it connected. Murdock snuck in one swift jab before catching the mercenary's follow up riposte, and he leapt upward such that he placed his feet against the desk with all the computer hardware, locked Andrej into an arm bar, and pushed backward with all his might, pulling the enormous soldier downward, face first into the floor. The mercenary growled angrily, trying to recover quickly, but Daredevil held firm, pressing all his available reserves of strength into forcing his enemy's arm to bend backward at the elbow. Andrej repeatedly lifted Daredevil's entire weight off the ground before slamming him back down again, attempting to loosen his opponent's grasp of his sinewy tattooed arm.

The much smaller of the two had now recovered, and climbed out of the wreckage of the broken shelves and called out, "Brother!" before rising to his feet and rushing over to where Daredevil and Andrej were embroiled in the fight of their lives. Things were about to get even more complicated, and for the first time since he'd entered the bank, Daredevil felt the palpable tinge of fear at the thought that maybe, just maybe, he was fighting a losing battle.

The smaller man delivered a swift kick to Murdock's face, snapping Daredevil's neck to the side but not loosening his grip on the mercenary leader's leg. Hot, frothy blood spewed like a fountain from Matt's mouth as he cursed, trying to consider what few options were left available to him. The steel-toed boot came again, this time causing his mask to fracture into two jagged halves. Now, all bets were off. The Daredevil's mask had been ruined, and to both these hitmen, his identity would now be known. And, it was highly possible that one more kick to his bruised and broken face would kill him.

Daredevil gave one last impassioned press at the bigger soldier's arm, and as luck would have it, it exceeded the natural angle the man's anatomy would allow, and an agonizing howl echoed throughout the office as broken bone erupted out the back of muscle, tissue and flesh. Matt released his grip instantly, completely drained of energy. Andrej stumbled backward against the desk, cursing and shrieking something in Serbian that, even to someone ignorant of the Baltic or Slavic languages, sounded foul and virulent. The one part he could understand was the order he gave to the smaller man who Matt now knew to be the Serbian leader's brother. The order had been given in English, for his benefit he was certain: _Kill him. Step on his fucking head, and fucking break it open like an egg._

Matt lay on his back, defeated, successful only in disarming a few gunmen for hire and putting one in physical therapy for about six months, staring blindly at the ceiling of the office, sweat and blood running over his unseeing eyes. Though his other senses were beginning to slowly dim, he could tell the large Serbian was now standing directly over him. And though he couldn't detect it with any of his heightened abilities, he was nearly certain the man was smiling.

"It was a good fight," the Serbian said, his accent sounding thicker through swollen lips, missing teeth, a crooked nose and a broken jaw. "I don't know who the fuck you are, or what you're doing here, but you fought with honor, and I respect that. So I will allow my brother to kill you quickly. I will send you to whatever God you believe in with that small mercy, Mr. Red."

The small man raised his booted heel. Just as he was about to send Matt to meet his maker, a nearby gunshot rang out throughout the office. Both soldiers cast their gaze in utter astonishment to the doorway where Foggy Nelson stood pointing a Zavastra M21 directly at them, a look of pure, unadulterated bale on his face.

"Move a goddamn muscle and I will fucking shoot you both dead right where you stand." He took the safety off. "I have had… _WAY_ too difficult…of a week…to be dealing with _**THIS SHIT**_ …right now."

"Foggy?" Daredevil groaned quietly, groping awkwardly where he lay.

"That's goddamn right it's Foggy. Frankly Foggy Nelson. This week, I've been shot at— _ **twice**_ —I've been lied to, cajoled, abandoned by friends, had several bones broken, tried to investigate a possible financial conspiracy where I work, handled not one, not a few, but _**all**_ of the legal paperwork and processing of my law firm's clients…and on top of all of that…I am now indebted to a fiery little hellion of a friend to an all-night sex marathon where _she picks the goddamn soundtrack_. _**DO NOT**_ fuck with me right now."

The mercenaries exchanged glances while Daredevil struggled to his feet. "The little one," Murdock gasped, catching his breath. "Bigger one's brother. Ask who they work for. Shoot the small one if the big one doesn't talk."

Andrej gently leaned forward and started to walk forward, but Foggy aimed the rifle at the ceiling and squeezed off a round before pointing the muzzle at the Serbian once more. "You heard the man. Who hired you to rob this bank?"

Andrej used his one good arm to pull his younger brother Pyotr behind him protectively. His brow furrowed darkly. "You know I cannot possibly tell you that."

"You can, and you will, or else the guy in the costume is going to make you watch while I shoot your little brother before I shoot you."

"Go ahead. Shoot us both. Even if we knew—"

Foggy angrily squeezed off another warning round in defiance. "If you even _think_ of feeding me the usual bad guy line like, 'We don't know the name of our employer', we'll add torture to the list of fun little activities to tack onto your heist exist strategy."

The Serbian shook his head disdainfully. "You fucking Americans," he sneered. "All of you fucking think you are such big fucking John Wayne cowboy guys, eh? All big and tough with your guns, think you can just intimidate us with such pathetic threats like torture? Hah!" He leaned forward and pantomimed slitting his own throat. "Boy, you don't even understand what this word _torture_ fucking means."

Matt's ears and nose twitched. He reclaimed the single combat baton he'd thrown when he'd made his entrance, and he whispered to Foggy, "It's useless. It's too late. NYPD SWAT is entering the bank lobby as we speak. I don't have my mask. It's all over. They'll arrest both these idiots _and_ me, but at least they're not going to get away. Not with murder, at least. They can be held accountable in a court of law, as will I for what I've done here today. But you—you've got to get out of here: _**right now**_."

"Matt, I swear to God, sometimes I wonder how you graduated magna cum laude and I ended up with summa cum laude. _Think_ , goddamit! The police will recognize you as Daredevil, yeah, but if you're Matt Murdock, you're just another bank hostage! Take the suit in the duffel bag on my back; I borrowed it from another hostage named Desmond."

Daredevil scrounged through the bag and found a shirt, trousers, tie and suit jacket, all colors and fabrics normally far-too gaudy for his taste. He grimaced, but asked, "Good, uh, thinking, Foggy, but uh, what's with all the phones in this bag?"

"Tell you later. Get changed quickly. I think I can hear the SWAT team in the lobby already."

As the remainder of the hostages were being provided with blankets, water bottles and media exposure just outside the bank, a series of shiny black government SUVs pulled noiselessly through the densest channel of the police barricades. At one point, a tinted, bulletproof window cracked slightly only for the briefest flash of credentials before four SUVs and two large cargo vans were allowed to pull throw and assemble at the curb just outside the bank. The police lieutenant in charge of NYPD operations, his FBI liaison and special agent coordinator, and the hostage negotiator all turned around in unison as the doors to the SUVs opened and a veritable squad of armed men and women emerged from within wearing dark navy jackets with bright yellow letters emblazoned on the backs which read: DCIS.

While several of the agents rushed past the barricades and up the steps to the bank, weapons drawn, ignoring the hostages and going straight up to where NYPD SWAT were carrying the disarmed militants out of the revolving door, the police lieutenant, a squat but mean-looking Italian, started in on the head of the freshly-arrived DCIS team.

"Hey, hey hey! What gives? We got this situation locked down. The hostages have all been released, we're bringing the gunmen out now."

"My name is Director Jack Fowler, I'm with the DOJ's Defense Criminal Investigative Service. I'm notifying you that, effective immediately, the hostage takers within the Durant-Murakami bank are to be remanded into federal custody immediately."

"Wait, what the fuck?" the FBI liaison began to say, but the Italian was, by virtue of an Italian, Big Apple upbringing, exceedingly louder.

"Wha-hey, hey! You got no fuckin' jurisdiction here, Jack Fowler! These fuckin' guys just shot up a bank in my precinct and—"

"You're not hearing me," Fowler said coolly, his expression neutral. "The men that attempted to rob this bank today are…" he lowered his voice and leaned forward to accommodate the shorter man's disposition. "…these men are property of the United States government. They have no social security numbers, no home address, no name, and no identity. They cannot be tried in a court of law nor can they appear on any television network or be held accountable for any crimes they might commit, either here on U.S. soil or abroad. These men are ghosts, lieutenant, and we've come to collect our renegade spooks and we would appreciate your cooperation. Your exemplary performance and your willingness to make the transition as smooth as possible will be noted and reflected in the reports that are submitted and reviewed by our bureau chief. He will no doubt keep your cooperation in mind during future inter-agency collaborations."

The NYPD officer in charge fell silent, speechless, and could do nothing but watch as all five mercenaries were escorted down the main steps of the Durant-Murakami Bank at 837 8th Avenue, disappearing inside the shiny black DOJ cargo vans before the convoy of vehicles rumbled to life and sped back off through the city as quickly as they'd arrived. The whole scene did not fall on deaf ears, as Murdock witnessed both the discussion between operation directors and the swift roundup and departure of the Serbian mercenaries with their DOJ escorts. At present, he was far too debilitated, winded, broken and bruised to do a damn thing about it. But he knew one thing. If these mercenaries could simply waltz out of one of New York City's more famous banks and hitch a sleek ride on the United States government's dime, he had clearly misread the entire situation. What had appeared on the surface to be a simple series of bank robberies had suddenly blossomed like a lotus flower into something far more intricate, complex and exotic. Was it somehow related to the shooting and the assassin at Karen Page's place? Was Wilson Fisk somehow involved? He had to know more. And impossible number of questions for which he had no answers. But answers would have to wait. He'd need a few new stitches and wrappings first. Not to mention a new costume too.


	8. Chapter 8: The Art of War

**The Art of War**

 _By Caudimordax_

The bulletproof, black-windowed DOJ SUVs rumbled down 10th avenue for several blocks before turning onto New York State Route 495, descending into the neon and chrome, boxcar jungle of the Lincoln Tunnel due west for New Jersey. There were three vehicles, and Andrej and his brother were in the middle of the convoy. Presumably, the rest of his team were in the rear vehicle while the lead SUV was helmed by Director Jack Fowler and his personal retinue. The two agents sharing the back of the van with the mercenaries were both enormously muscular, tree trunk arms bursting at the seams of their ridiculously tight-fitting field jackets, and felt more like armed guards than escorts. The Serbian warlord held up his wrists and cracked a toothy smile at the agent closest to him. "We've gone far enough. The charade is over, comrade. Take off these handcuffs. My arm is broken and I must properly dress the wound."

The burly agent shook his army-shaved head, his lower lip curled into a hostile sneer. "Please do not speak until we've arrived at our destination."

Andrej frowned, surprised at his escort's insouciance. "Come on, buddy," the Serbian groaned, "We're on the same side here. You don't have to—"

"I've asked you once to shut your mouth," the agent interrupted him, "and now I'm going to tell you again. If you don't close your goddamn mouth right the fuck now, I will put a bullet through your head, and our reports shall read that you tried to overtake the vehicle and were shot dead during your attempted escape."

The Serbian glanced toward the other agent who simply nodded stoically. The European mercenary sighed, tossed his long hair out of his eyes and reclined against the side of the van. He considered the direction the winds of fate had taken; less than a half hour ago, he'd been the one threatening to shoot strangers in the head. War, it seemed, was not without a sense of irony.

"Can I at least have a cigarette?" Andrej asked as an afterthought.

The traffic of the Lincoln Tunnel was lighter than usual and certainly nothing remotely comparable to rush-hour, but the subterranean tube spanning the Hudson River dividing New York and New Jersey was perilously navigated at any hour of the day. From traffic accidents and gridlock-related flow congestion to dog-sized rats, drunk vagrants and construction projects, the Lincoln Tunnel was a two-lane, claustrophobic nightmare funneling a colossal amount of people, goods and services through a ludicrously tight space—beneath thousands of gallons of water—that was hardly ever maintained. Carrying a daily average of approximately 110,000 motor vehicles, it was considered to be one of the most high-risk terrorist target sites in the United States. And it was easy to see why, for launching an attack in a dark, congested, mile and a half long tunnel could be accomplished, under the right circumstances, with little difficulty.

And the circumstances were right, for the convoy of DOJ SUVs didn't even see the motorcyclists weaving sharply from lane to lane until they were already upon them. There were three, all completely garbed in crimson-colored PVC suits and matching motocross helmets with polished black visors, and they were riding Kawasaki Ninja H2Rs in midnight black. As the bikers reached the convoy, one of them decelerated and took up the rear while the other two sped by along the flanks of the SUV column, immediately setting to work peppering the sides of the vans with 9mm rounds from two heavily-modified Daewoo XK10 submachine guns.

The sudden outburst of gunfire set the tunnel ablaze with panic and pandemonium; immediately cars screeched noisily to disastrous halts, vehicles impacted with one another to a soundtrack of crumpling metal and breaking glass, civilians screamed and horns bellowed, all of these nearly completely drowned out by the projectile exchange between both factions. The assailants on motorcycles weaved and dodged, expertly panning and timing their movements to avoid lethal angles of fire from the DOJ agents shooting from within the vans as they answered the bikers with M4 assault rifles and Glock G19s. The attackers' movements were choreographed by their leader, who commanded the other two from the fore of the chaos through Bluetooth headsets installed within their bike helmets. And presently he had ordered his team to shoot out the tires of the DOJ vehicles, a tactic met with great success when the rear-most SUV immediately lost control and veered directly into a garbage truck as it passed on the right. The second vehicle jackknifed at nearly fifty miles per hour, spinning approximately 108° on four wheels before torque and angular momentum combined with the weight of its passengers forced it onto two, sending the van into a ghastly roll of no fewer than five complete revolutions before the automobile finally came to rest, upside down, wheels spinning and smoking slightly.

Looking over his shoulder, the crimson bike leader saw that both vans had been neutralized, and he abandoned his pursuit of the Director's SUV, slowing to a stop and spinning the wheels of his ride in place a moment—almost tauntingly as he stared after the Fowler's car—before zipping off back down the tunnel to where his crew had already gone to work. Inside the first SUV, Fowler radioed for immediate backup while simultaneously unbuckling his belt, removing it, and tying a makeshift tourniquet around his wounded left arm. He could still feel his entire limb and his hand, so he knew it could only be a flesh wound. Fowler didn't bother checking the pulse of the driver—the bullet hole in the man's forehead was definitive enough. Gritting his teeth and straining his aching muscles, he reached across the driver's glass-strewn, bloody lap, opening the door and pushing the dead body out of the car. Jack groaned with pain as he eased himself across the center rest between the two sides, and assumed direct control of both his vehicle and the operation.

Several shots rang out in a now vacated tunnel as the cyclist who'd been heading up the rear executed any survivors of the first van to crash. Shouts and screams and horns were a distant murmur, so quiet now that the purr of the H2R motorcycle engines seemed like a roar by comparison. The leader of the biker trio pulled up slowly beside the 2nd SUV. The other cyclist finished checking for survivors in the front seats before hopping down to the asphalt. The taller biker looked at the shorter and slender figured leader for a moment before shaking his head from side to side. The leader nodded, then removed his helmet. _**He**_ , it turned out, was a _**she**_ , an Asian woman of indeterminate age—anywhere from mid-twenties to early thirties, really—with short, feathered, snow-white hair and a single, black, silken braid framing the left side of her face. Such was the alabastrine luster of her skin that it was as if the very sun could not claim to have ever made her acquaintance. Black tattooed lines ran up her slender neck like razor-thin javelins, and her lower lip possessed a gash that had clearly been too deep to heal correctly. She spoke to her subordinate in dialectal Japanese:

[Let's get what we came for.]

The biker nodded.

[Yes ma'am.]

With some effort, the taller subordinate managed to open the back doors to the van which, being that the vehicle was currently on its side, opened vertically. The interior of the SUV was full of carnage. Painted with gear and guts, the insides of the van told a nightmarishly violent story of four men, two field agents and two European mercenaries, who were either cut to pieces by machine gun rounds or were smashed to smithereens as the van careened into a roll. One of the two mercenaries, a spindly man of small stature, was almost unrecognizable, and his limbs had been bent at funny angles. As the taller biker began to climb inside, the largest of the SUV's occupants shifted slightly and groaned. The cyclist froze for a moment before edging forward and using the muzzle of his gun to raise the large man's head. A thick, syrupy tendril of blood oozed forth from the mercenaries mouth. Though his eyes did not open, his lashes fluttered slightly. Even in the grim darkness of the van, the biker's trained powers of perception caught the moment.

[Survivor,] he said simply into the headset.

The short-haired woman climbed into the van a moment later.

[Watch your step, ma'am. Shell casings, guns, field equipment all over the floor.]

[Broken bones or broken glass, it makes no difference to me. Is it the big one?]

The taller biker nodded.

The woman used her gun to raise the mercenary's head once more. Andrej groaned again as he drifted back into the reality of searing, agonizing pain wrought by a dislocated shoulder, several broken ribs, a series of glass shards piercing his solar plexus, hips, thighs and biceps as well as two gunshot wounds to his back, and of course, his fractured arm and the bone protruding from it.

[He's a big one, isn't he?] the woman cracked a wry smile toward her biker compatriot before lifting up one leg and placing a stiletto heel down upon the mercenary's broken arm. "Where is it?" she said to Andrej in English affected by a British accent.

The Serbian could barely choke the words out. "Where…is what?"

The woman pressed her heel down firmly upon the inflamed, bleeding tissue surrounding Andrej's wound. The Serbian gnashed his teeth together, grimacing, but never crying out. "What you stole. From the bank. Where is it?"

At this, the mercenary leader began to laugh dryly for several moments, causing the woman and the helmeted biker to exchange glances, then he coughed and sputtered, blood, saliva and bile oozing down onto what had become the floor of the van. The porcelain-skinned cyclist brought the muzzle of her gun up to Andrej's face. "The item," she repeated coldly.

The Serbian warlord glanced at his brother's dead body for a moment before whispering a silent prayer in Russian under his breath.

"What did you say?" the woman demanded.

Andrej brought his eyes upward to meet her gaze. Cold, dead, hateful black eyes stared back at him. "I said, 'Why don't you take that cheap, Korean, piece-of-shit gun of yours and shove the business end right up your tight, severely under-fucked, sideways chink—"

The sentiment was punctuated prematurely by the bullet that entered the Serbian's brain at point blank range and exited out the back of his skull, taking with it what the Serbian had, mere fractions of a second earlier, considered to be quite the killing joke.

"Search him," the woman ordered.

The tall biker searched through the mercenary's pants pockets, flak jacket, and rucksack before he finally located the hidden compartment inside the man's belt buckle. In it the biker discovered a small, black, unadorned USB drive. He procured it and handed it to his superior.

[That must be it.]

She nodded. [We're done here. Number 3, we're rolling out.]

[Everyone's dead here. Green to go.]

As the woman and her subordinate hopped out of the van and made to return to their bikes, a flurry of automatic fire rumbled down the corridor causing them both to immediate take cover behind the flipped SUV. Agent Jack Fowler had decided to take matters into his own hands and to Hell with backup. Live or die time. Like in the old days, the days when you could still dish out hard street justice without having to wrangle the approval to discharge your weapon at a murdering, bike-riding psychopath from five different people up through the chain of command. The DOJ Director had parked his van some hundred yards down the tunnel at an angle, had opened the door for cover, and was now firing well-aimed shots from an M16 carbine directly toward them.

Biker number 3 sped past his two allies on his bike and opened fire with his XK10. Fowler ducked behind the door of the SUV before releasing the clip from his rifle and quickly inserting another magazine. But by the time the Director managed, with shaking hands and short of breath, to chamber the magazine and refocus his sights over the bottom of the door's window frame, his assailant was already upon him. The cyclist leapt off his bike and let the vehicle slide into the open door of the SUV, causing it to slam Fowler against the side of the van with a grunt of surprise and pain. It was as though the cyclist was lighter than air, for he sailed up and over both Jack and the door, landing miraculously on two feet before spinning around and aiming his machine gun at the Director.

Fowler groped for a second on the pavement for the M16, but realized to his horror it was entirely out of reach. He threw his hands up over his head as the muzzle of the biker's machine gun was brought to bear in his direction. "No! Wait!" he cried out, less than a shrill, terrifying second before he was shredded by a dozen 9mm shells.

* * *

While midtown of Hell's Kitchen was under siege, back at Karen's apartment building, Ben McLain was having serious problems of his own. Only five minutes after he'd executed the last of the ninja kill squad in the forehead, he'd begun to feel unusually warm, and a prickly feeling rose upon his skin. By the time the hitman managed to extricate himself unseen out the back entrance to the tenement, he was sweating profusely. The midday light outside was blinding, and he shielded his dilated pupils by pulling the brim of his baseball cap down over his head. He looked around frantically and spied the CVS pharmacy one block down across the street. Fighting back the nausea, he pulled his jacket tightly around him and made his way as discreetly as possible to the corner where he waited to cross, barely managing not to stumble to the pavement when the light for the crosswalk turned green.

A tastelessly generic pop tune was playing quietly on the radio as McLain stumbled into the pharmacy, but whatever poison he was now certain the ninja had cut him with was causing his senses to go haywire, and the syncopated throbbing of the music was deafening. There was a skull-splitting pain that came with it as the volume of information absorbed through his cybernetic enhancements overwhelmed what his mortal senses could withstand resulting in the onset of system shock and organ failure. Ben made his way quickly to the back of the pharmacy where the medical enclave was and tasted the first morsel of good fortune he'd savored that day, as there was no one waiting in line to be helped. McLain stumbled up to the counter, licking his dry, bluish lips carelessly with a numb tongue. The pharmacist turned, a sharp-looking woman with glasses, her dirty-blond hair tied up in an impossibly tight bun.

"May I help you?"

McLain placed his palms down flat upon the counter. "Do you have a defibrillator here?" he managed to slur at the pharmacist.

"I'm sorry?"

" _ **A fucking defibrillator!**_ " McLain roared angrily. "Do you have one?"

"Sir, I'm sorry, I'm going to have to ask you to—"

Ben had run out of patience before he'd run out of time. Reaching inside his jacket, he whipped out one of his signature custom pistols and aimed it directly at the pharmacist who immediately threw her hands up and stumbled several small, awkward steps backward against the wall. The hitman groaned loudly in agony as he heaved himself up and over the counter and down onto the floor opposite. " _ **The paddles! Get them or punch out early! Your choice!**_ "

"Yes!" the woman chirped, nearly paralyzed with fear. "Yes! Okay! Yes, I'll get them!"

As she scurried away, McLain whipped his pistol to the side in a wide arc, pointing the gun toward a tall, solidly-built black man, also wearing a pharmacist coat. The man was frozen, his eyes wide and white, his mouth hanging agape as though he couldn't quite process what was unfolding before him. Subsequently, he probably didn't realize he was still holding a phone in his outstretched hand.

"Did you call the police?" McLain barked at him.

The man shook his head in wonder. "What?"

" _ **The fucking police!**_ Did you call them?" Ben repeated himself just before swallowing down another wave of nausea.

The pharmacist, mouth still hanging in shock, simply turned his head slowly to and fro, but said nothing. McLain squeezed a solitary, silenced round into the man's head with a muted _thmmmp_ as bullet triumphed over bone, a red mist dissipating into the air as the pharmacist dropped. He couldn't take any chances. Ben had to assume the police were coming, even if the pharmacist hadn't placed a 9-1-1 emergency call. The hitman looked down at his watch, then set the timer for three minutes, counting down. When the female pharmacist returned with the defibrillator and saw her coworker dead on the floor, she began to scream. The end of the barrel of Ben's pistol appearing directly in front of her face silenced her.

"Put a pin in it, or you'll end up just like him! Now, you're going to do exactly what I say or else you are going to die! Do you understand?"

The blond woman nodded, her face still aghast as she gripped the paddles tightly with white knuckles.

"I've been…" he coughed and sputtered. "I've been severely poisoned, and it's starting to go into my heart. The toxin is going to be pumped throughout…" Ben paused for a moment, then wretched forward and vomited a stream of mucous-filled blood. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. "The toxin…the toxin is going to enter my bloodstream un…unless we restart my heart. To do that…" More blood. "…I have to die. And you're…you're going to bring me back."

"W-w-what?" the pharmacist stammered.

Ben scrambled along the countertops, searching for wires and cables and following them to their source, a circuit breaker just beside the storage room door. He yanked roughly on the master power lever, switching it off and darkening the medical enclave behind the service counter. After a moment, the emergency generator lights kicked in. McLain pulled with all his might, ripping a thick electrical wire out from beneath the box, eliciting a number of sparks that flickered to the floor. "Good," he grunted, before fishing a pair of thin wooden tongue depressors out of a cylindrical container on the counter. "Now, as a medical pr...professional…you are bound by your oath to try, to the best of your ability, to resuscitate a dead body no matter the circumstances." As he spoke, McLain sat down on the floor, bracing himself against the rear counter so that he was facing the entrance to the store. He glanced quickly at his watch. _Two minutes_. He pointed his gun at the pharmacist. "Are you listening?" he asked, rubbing his bleary eyes on his sleeve.

"Yes! I am bound by my duty as a medical practitioner t-t-to try to bring you back to life!"

Ben wrapped the wire around one of his arms and clutched it so that there was contact between the ruptured leads and his skin. "You're going to flip the switch on the fuse box which will electrocute me and induce cardiac arrest, then you will use the defibrillator to bring me back. Understand?"

The pharmacist nodded. McLain knew it was a long shot. But he had no choice. He lowered his pistol and placed the tongue depressors horizontally, one atop the other, in his mouth and bit down, nodding his assent to the pharmacist. After several long moments, she reluctantly threw the switch, instantly directing the charge from the 240-volt electrical circuit breaker into McLain's body. The current caused his muscles to contract instantly, and his jaw clenched and snapped the two tongue depressors in half, protecting both his tongue and teeth as Ben slumped against the back counter in cardiac arrest.

For several seconds that seemed like an age of the earth, the pharmacist stood motionless as the logic centers of her brain began to realistically consider her options with the threat of death momentarily neutralized. After a moment, she slowly and prudently walked over to the motionless body of Ben McLain and gingerly pried his pistol out of his lifeless hand. She looked over at the corpse of her coworker Greg who was now missing a part of his face, the phone he'd been answering now bleating a steady busy tone. For a moment she seriously considered shooting Greg's killer, figuring with a bullet from the dead man's gun lodged in Greg's cerebellum she would probably be able to argue fairly convincingly in a court of law it was a self-defense killing. Or, she could simply _not_ revive him. But Elizabeth was a pharmacist, and a good one with sights on one day becoming a doctor and working at a big, fancy hospital, like the sort on the medical procedural television shows like E.R., Grey's Anatomy and House M.D. that she had grown up on, obsessed over, and modeled her career path after. And a doctor heading up an entire staff division at a hospital like the ones in those shows would never let a patient in defib, even if they were a murdering psychopath with a gun, to go quietly into the night without first exhausting every last attempt at saving a life.

And so, Elizabeth laid McLain's pistol down on the pharmacy counter and leaned forward, putting her ear just above Ben's open mouth to listen for breathing. Dead silence. Next she quickly opened up his jacket and grabbed a scissor from the top drawer of the counter to cut off his t-shirt. She arched an eyebrow when the removal of his shirt unveiled a physique not unlike that of her fiancée, Ian, who was United States Army and boasted similar tattoos to the ones McLain himself possessed. She charged the device and rubbed the paddles together, taking a deep, nervous breath. _This is going to be the death of you, Elizabeth_ , a voice in her mind told her. She pushed the trepidation from her head and heart with professional determination.

"Clear," she said, then pressed the paddles to Ben McLain's chest.

* * *

Matt winced as Claire Temple added another layer of gauze around his aching midsection, the fire he now felt in his body on par with the blaze of urgency and anger that raged within his soul. In his haste, Murdock had taken an incredible beating from an adversary who might very well have killed him had Foggy Nelson not shown up when he did. He'd charged into a situation with virtually no planning or rehearsal, a situation with dozens of unknown variables, and pitched himself against opponents that were leagues beyond the usual rogues' gallery of Hell's Kitchen riffraff he usually tangoed with. All of this he'd done with no backup, no escape plan, and testing experimental gear that he couldn't even be certain would work, even if the genius Melvin Potter had designed it. He'd forsaken all of his training, all of his instincts. And for what? He had nothing to show for it, save the bruises, scrapes, broken bones and new scars he now added to his growing canvas of nightly self-flagellation. He'd gathered no helpful information, and even the criminals themselves had been practically provided with a red carpet escort right out of the borough. He'd been an utter failure in every conceivable aspect of the operation. But perhaps what bothered him most was that the very man who had called for his help had ended up saving _his_ life instead. Daredevil had never felt less heroic in his entire career wearing the mask.

"You really do need to see a doctor," Claire said sternly. "Like, pretty much immediately. These injuries, Matt…they're extensive. You could have internal bleeding."

Murdock forced a half-smile. "I'm already seeing a doctor. Doctor Claire Temple."

Claire intentionally pulled the wrappings tighter before using a scissor to cut the gauze, eliciting a groan from her patient. "Not a doctor yet," she reminded him. "But enough of one to know that you're lucky to be alive. Matt, I—"

"I know," Murdock said quickly, rubbing at a soreness in his right shoulder with his left arm. "Clare, we do this every time. Can we just not?"

Claire stood up and picked up her portable medkit. She pointed. "Couch."

Matt obediently moved from the chair he'd been sitting in to the couch, sighed audibly as he eased his aching body onto the significantly-more comfortable cushions. Temple attended him, straddling him with a thigh on either side of his hips, setting her medkit down to the side and procuring a cotton ball and a small flask of isopropyl rubbing alcohol. Murdock's jaw fell open slightly as his functioning senses manifested a mental image of the beautiful woman sitting atop his lap. "Um, Claire?"

"I'm serious about the internal bleeding, Matt," Temple ignored him as she wet the cotton ball and pressed it to Murdock's face, eliciting a gasp and a wince from the Devil of Hell's Kitchen.

"I'm not internally bleeding," Murdock grumbled.

"Oh? And is that assessment based on all the time you spent in med school earning your veritable plethora of medical degrees?"

Murdock knew he couldn't just explain to Claire that if he was internally hemorrhaging blood, he'd not only be able to smell and taste the iron in his bloodstream as it gushed out into his body, but also from the erratic rhythm of his own heartbeat.

"I…just…have _really_ good intuition about these sort of things. This wasn't my first brawl, either."

"Well it was almost your last," Temple shot back.

"Don't be over-dramatic, Claire."

The nurse leaned back, raising an eyebrow. "Over-dramatic? Matt, your nose is broken in two places. You might have an acute tear in your meniscus, or possibly even an ACL rupture. Your rib-cage is badly bruised. I'm almost positive you probably suffered another concussion, and you've got two black eyes—Matt, honestly, you look worse than the very first time I found you. Frankly, I've never seen you look this bad. And I've seen bad."

"Well, that makes one of us."

Claire rolled her eyes. "That's not funny. I'll patch you up this time, but seriously, you're _going_ to go to a hospital, even if I have to call and make the appointment myself."

"Claire—" Matt began to protest, but she pressed a finger to his lips.

"First rule of Temple Hospital: no speaking in the operating room unless spoken to." Claire began to sew stitches through the gash above Matt's right eye. "I still don't entirely understand how you get in fights…you know…since you can't actually _see_."

"So…you actually do believe that I get in fights…and you're fine with that."

"I didn't say that," Claire chided sternly.

"But you accept that I'm a blind man that fights. That doesn't…I don't know…contradict logic in your head, for some particular reason?"

"Of course it does," Temple replied as she did what she did best. "But I'm a medical professional. I know what a body looks like after it's been beaten to a pulp. And I know what damaged retinas and corneas look like. I've got to draw conclusions from the evidence available, don't I?"

Suddenly, Matt found himself utterly consumed by a blistering yearning to completely eschew all pretense and tell Claire everything. There was something indescribably powerful in the sterile, unfettered lens of logic through which Temple saw the world, and it made Matthew feel an exhilarating sense of vulnerability as though he might unwittingly betray his innermost, darkest secrets to her at any moment. Claire Temple was equal parts pragmatic and noble, characteristics he personally championed both in others and himself. Though at times the woman could be excessively punctilious, she always did what had to be done even if it was in conflict with whatever personal ideologies she might harbor. Matt knew very few women who were as candid, blunt and upfront as Claire. Her attitude toward his blindness and the perpetual beatings he received while cavorting around on his vigilante missions was one of stoic critique, but Murdock could not help but wonder if her reserved demeanor existed only because neither would dare acknowledge the gravitation that existed within their hungry spirits during their oftentimes ambiguously-flirtatious repartee.

At once, he found her inextricably intoxicating. The weight of her slim figure balanced upon his lap, the pungent, exotic aroma of her skin, the faint whiff of Greek food she'd enjoyed some time ago, the lavender and coconut scent infused into her voluminous, tumbling hair, even the pleasant smell of the laundry detergent she used still clinging to her light-gray hoodie—all of these things titillated his aching senses and for a moment, he not only forgot about the pain he was feeling in his body, but the pain imbued in his heart by the cruel, dark, greasy, grimy kitchen that he called home. It was the ultimate irony, perhaps, that only the latex-gloved hands of a beautiful nurse were truly able to completely disarm him.

"Ok, I can't do this anymore," Murdock said suddenly, placing his hands upon Claire's thighs and gently pushing to indicate that he wanted to stand.

But Claire snipped off the last of the stitches above Matt's eyebrow, placed a hand upon his chest and pushed him down against the back of the sofa. "Stop fidgeting. I'm not finished yet. We've got a ways to go. What can't you do anymore?"

"This."

"This?"

"Yes, Claire. Whatever _this_ is, I can't do it."

"Now it's my powers of observation that are failing me; what is it you can't do, Matt?"

Murdock sighed anxiously, aware that his control of the situation was rapidly slipping away. "Claire, I once told you that there were… _other_ …ways to see. Do you remember that?"

Temple nodded. "I'll definitely never forget the day I pulled you out of a dumpster, half-dead and beat to shit. It was probably the best _and_ worst day of my entire life."

"Why do you say that?"

Claire tilted her head and stared at Matt thoughtfully, biting her lower lip gently. "Because that day you turned my entire life upside down, Matt. I mean, right up until that point, I was living a normal life. A safe life. But…" she faltered. "…but it was a life without color. When I…" she thought a moment again. "…when I went to med school to study to become a doctor, I did it because I genuinely wanted to help people. To make a difference. You know, I grew up here. In the projects of Hell's Kitchen. It's like growing up in a war zone; people get shot, robbed, kidnapped, raped, and there's no reason why. And the perpetrators of these crimes—the ugly, writhing filth of this city—are almost never held accountable. And God?" She ran her gloved, slightly-bloodied latex glove back through her long dark hair before fishing out the small golden cross hanging round her neck and stared at it for a moment. "There is no God here in the Kitchen, Matt, only a bunch of unanswered prayers. Christ, it sounds young and naïve and stupid, I know, but I just…I really expected that when I saved people at Metro General, I'd _feel_ it…like…deep down inside someplace…that feeling that you get when you know you've made a difference…and a good one. That feeling that fills you with a rush of hope. With faith. With a desire to keep living."

Murdock clung to each and every word that fell from the woman's lips. Though he was no longer sure if the dizziness and warmth he was feeling was due to his injuries or to his obvious attraction to Claire, he identified completely with what she was laboring so hard to express.

"I know just what you mean, Claire," Matt whispered. "Which is why I think that…that if I tell you that I can not only see, but experience things on a spectrum infinitely more vivid than anything you could possibly imagine, you'll believe me. You'll _**understand**_ me. Claire…I… _want_ you to understand me. Honestly, I don't think anyone else does."

"Matt, I think—" Claire began to say, but before she could continue, Matt leaned forward, bringing his hands from Temple's thighs up to her cheeks before finding her lips with his own. Even the pain of his aching joints, unsealed wounds, sprained muscles and bruised flesh could not diminish the unassailable magnetism drawing him to Claire. The entirety of his heightened senses were aflame with her intoxicating smells, the lingering flavors on her lips, and the quickening of her heartbeat as they kissed. It was so overwhelming and powerful a barrage of sensations that Matt pulled away briefly, a thin, sparkly tendril of saliva still connecting their mouths momentarily.

"That's the second time I've been absolutely unable _**not**_ to kiss you," Murdock gasped, finishing the sentence just before Claire pounced upon him, pushing him once more back into the sofa as she wriggled her own tongue back inside Matt's mouth.

The two of them explored each others mouths with renewed vigor. Their yearning for intimacy had for so long been restrained and subdued by what some would call _superfluous virtue_ that they became savages, desperate and wanton in their reckless haste to shed whatever garments they both wore, tearing fabric and bandage alike in the process. This prompted Claire to promise quickly that she'd "stitch [him] up like new again later", before the two of them fell naked together onto Murdock's couch. It was then and there that Claire Temple quickly discovered that whatever cryptic ability enabled Matt to pound thugs into the pavement night after night despite being _**totally blind**_ also had a number of _**other**_ applications. Temple curled her toes and threw her head back as Murdock worshiped Claire like the very goddess of fire she appeared to him to be, kissing and licking every erogenous zone in her body from neck to foot and back again before she reciprocated the favor in kind.

Matt spent himself upon her, exhausting the entire repertoire of sexual positions a man in his physical condition could realistically accomplish over the course of a twenty minute, adrenaline-fueled Bacchanalia that included not only the couch, but the chair, the floor, and even briefly the kitchen counter. Both of them fought through unreal amounts of exhaustion for a chance to find comfort, acceptance, and release in the arms of somebody who genuinely and selflessly reciprocated their affection. Temple managed to reach orgasm three times before the fatigue of dressing and stitching of Matt's wounds after she'd literally just come off a double shift at the hospital saw her succumb to a blissful, post-coitus slumber on the couch. Matt stood naked in the living room for some time, watching her sleep with a smile on her face and the tip of her thumb gently tucked into the corner of her mouth. Murdock fetched a sheet and a comforter and draped them over the sleeping angel in front of him before donning a pair of boxer shorts and heading for the refrigerator to grab a cold beer. He breathed a sigh of relief as his senses told him there were still four, frigid bottles of Stella Artois left. Reaching in, he grabbed one before closing the door, nearly stumbling back against the kitchen island with fright as he found himself staring directly at a previously undetected man dressed in faded green, Vietnam-era combat fatigues who stood leaning against where the kitchen wall ended and the living room began.

"Well?" Stick rasped. "You going to offer an old man a beer or what?"


	9. Chapter 9: Deaf Gods and Dead Men

**Deaf Gods and Dead Men**

 _By Caudimordax_

" _It is a man's own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways."_

– _Buddha_

Several long, awkward moments elapsed before Matt was able to shake the stupor of being surprised by his former mentor, then he kicked the refrigerator door shut with an irritable grunt. He grabbed the bottle opener off the marble-topped kitchen island before trotting past Stick and into the living room, bound for the couch where Claire Temple still slept. Her breathing was slow and measured, evidence that she had found the exquisite calm of pleasant dreams that Murdock would never know. The noises she made while she slept relaxed him and made him feel grounded somehow, and now that blind asshole on his blood-soaked crusade threatened that.

"Rude," Stick muttered before opening the refrigerator and helping himself to a beer.

"Get out of my apartment," Matt said, pulling the extra comforter on the back of the couch over Claire's sleeping figure.

Using the buckle of his belt, Stick popped the cap of his beer, brought the drink to his mouth and took a deep swig. The bottle cap rattled noisily upon the tiled kitchen floor. He sighed, pursed his lips and made a couple of smacking sounds, then bristled. "This is some weak shit, Matt," he observed.

"You're _**blind**_ , not _**deaf**_ ," Murdock seethed. "You heard what I said; get the hell out of my house."

"Now Matty, I only just got here. I know you and I have had our… _ **differences**_ …but right now, it's critically important that we both put those differences aside like the mature, rational, tactically-minded adults that we are."

Matt shook his head from side to side with annoyance. "What in God's name are you rambling about this time, _**Stick**_?"

The old man chuckled wryly before taking another swig of beer. "It's a whole new game this time, Matt, and God decided he was going to sit this one out. This game's between _**men**_ and the _**Devil**_. _**And the Devil's playing for keeps.**_ "

Murdock strode briskly across the living room and stopped but a foot away from his former mentor, thrusting a finger angrily in front of his face. "I have company, as you, of course, _**are**_ aware, and I don't have time to listen to your crazy conspiracy theories or your abhorrent preoccupation with assassinating children. Now _**get—out.**_ "

Suddenly, Stick's thin lips crooked into something of a sneer. " _ **Make me**_ ," he replied.

The two of them stood only a foot apart, statue-still silhouettes amidst the misty golden sunbeams pouring in through the industrial repurposed windows that, by day, striped his apartment in alternating bands of ethereal yellow-blue light and cold, cast-iron umbrage. One of the windows was cracked, and the discordant symphony of Hell's Kitchen's streets wafted reticently into the apartment from below. About two hundred feet down the block, the Indian food cart on the corner was dolling out a fresh batch of crispy, tangy _bhel puri_ , the air saturated with the mingling aromas of rice, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, cilantro and chutneys. The citrusy scent of Claire's perfume was in there somewhere, and not entirely lost to a nose as trained as Matt's or Stick's. An apartment door creaked open then closed noisily two floors beneath them.

 _The hell with it,_ Matt thought to himself. As always, Stick knew exactly how to push his buttons, and this time, the old man had pushed one-too-many. _I'm going to teach this old bastard a lesson. Here. Now._

Before Matt had even begun to move, Stick transferred his beer into his left hand and moved it behind his back. As Murdock threw the first blow, Stick stepped forward so quickly that even in Matt's fiery perception of the world he was a blur, turning his right shoulder into the crook of Murdock's arm with horrifying precision so that the punch lost both direction and power simultaneously. As Matt's right arm spun away deflected, Stick retracted his right arm and expertly hooked the forefinger and middle finger of his right hand up into the soft tissue of Murdock's jaw, just behind his chin. The sudden rush of pain was so jarring that a dizzying whiteness bleached his vision, and he was helpless as Stick pulled him backward several steps toward the kitchen. Trying to recover, he swatted Stick's hand away with his left, but the fingers snapped almost immediately back into his neck like an incensed cobra, causing a rope of spit to spray out of his mouth. Desperately Matt grabbed Stick's hand and fingers tightly in his right hand and pulled them away, attempting to break his former mentor's hand and bring the challenge to an early, ruinous, but well-deserved end for the old man. But a swift victory was not in the cards.

Stick uttered a mocking snort before turning his wrist so that his palm faced upward. His thumb slipped out of Murdock's vice grip, recoiled then struck like a snake into the pressure point located between Matt's own thumb and forefinger. Matt's grip on Stick's hand evaporated as he cried out in pain, a sound soon silenced as the old man's iron fist connected with his mouth and chin. Blood sprayed from Murdock's mouth as he stumbled backward across the living room, and Stick merely retrieved the beer from behind his back and took another swig. Then he shook his head.

"All these years and you still haven't learned _**fuck-all**_!" Stick snorted upbraidingly. He gazed around the industrial brick-steel opulence of Matt's loft. "Is it all this _**money**_ you've made making you so _**soft**_?"

Matt wiped the blood from his mouth, then charged back into combat. He lead with a strike kick, his right foot searching for Stick's head. The old man gently bobbed his head away, using his right hand to interrupt the left cross that followed. It wasn't the first time they'd ever sparred, and Murdock was hip to Stick's penchant for sudden knees to the groin and torso. It came, as expected, and Matt pounded his fist into the old man's thigh. Stick yelped, losing his balance and rendering him unable to stop Matt's left fist from smashing into the right side of his face, decisively dislocating his jaw with a sickening pop. Stick stumbled a few paces backward as Murdock assumed a combat stance.

" _ **Soft enough for you?**_ " Matt shot back.

Stick grinned, putting his hands to his face before resetting his own jaw with a raspy grunt. "You're still a _**pussy**_ ," the old man nodded.

"Matt, what the _**hell**_ is going on?" said Claire Temple from behind them, still half-dazed and roused from deep slumber, the blankets wrapped loosely around her. Her messy, tangled locks tumbled over her bare shoulders, her mocha skin glistening in the ivory-blue afternoon sunlight. She was rubbing at her eyes, trying to make out the two figures in the shadows in the center of the room.

"Matt, tell the nurse girl that visiting hours are over; we have business to attend to."

Murdock stretched out his hand toward Stick and opened his mouth to speak, but Claire interjected.

"Matt? Who in the hell is… _ **oh my God**_ , are you two _**fighting**_?"

"No," Murdock said quickly, turning his head to face her.

"Yes, we are," Stick replied casually. "It would be better if you'd leave. Now."

Temple pulled the blankets more tightly around herself, a cross expression suddenly befalling her face. She now sat on her knees, her hands resting on the back of the sofa. She looked back and forth from Matt to Stick. "Yeah, well…what if I don't want to leave? What if…what if I want to stay right here?"

The old man bristled, barely noticeably, but he relaxed less than a second later, chuckled and looked in the direction of where Matt was standing beside Claire. "Well, at the very least, Matty, I do like this one better than the last few bimbos you whored your way through. At least this one's got attitude."

Matt took a step toward stick, pointing his finger, his lip curling into a sneer. "You better close those lips before I rip them right off your face, you sad, pathetic old man."

Stick's white eyes gleamed at Claire from the band of darkness in which he stood motionless. "You _**do**_ know about your boyfriend's nocturnal hobby, don't you?"

Claire nodded nervously. " _ **Of course**_. I'm not just some _**bimbo,**_ you know. And I also know he can definitely kick your malnourished geriatric ass."

The old man gave a genuine laugh. "I suppose, then, that he told you _**how**_ he became the man he is today."

"Shut up," Matt whispered.

"How he learned the skills he's got."

"I swear to Christ, Stick."

"Who he learned them from."

"If you don't stop talking right this second, I—"

"And what he did with those skills to get where he is today."

There was no more certainty in Claire's face. No more false-bravado in her tone. But even before she'd uttered a word, Stick knew what the answer would be. Of all the scents and smells that abound in the odiferous world of human beings, none is more rank and redolent than the stench of fear. And Stick could have smelled the fear on Claire if he'd been standing two blocks away directly beside the Indian food cart.

"I don't care what Matt did in the past," she said quietly after a moment. She looked at Murdock with searching eyes. "We've all done bad things…but there is _**forgiveness**_ in the things we do today that make the world a brighter place to live."

"Ah," Stick smiled, finishing his beer in a trio of loud gulps. "Guilt is the _**great redeemer**_ , the righteous crucible in which all heroes are forged. We sin; we atone. We sin again. We atone anew. The serpent eating its own tail. The _**great wheel**_ ever weaving. There can be no good in this world unless there is first evil. We're all guilty of terrible things, things that compel us to strike against the very darkness reflected in ourselves."

"You don't have to _**be**_ evil to _**stop**_ evil," Murdock interjected. "I'm tired of your lunatic ravings, Stick. Your _quasi-Eastern_ , _pseudo-mystic_ rejection of culpability and responsibility for your actions. Tired of your claims that you commit evil acts because it somehow gives you the strength to commit good acts or whatever. God, I pity you, old man. You're not only blind, but figuratively short-sighted too. You can't even see that you're rationalizing the terrible things you do by saying that _**without**_ doing them, evil would be greater and you'd lack the strength to fight it? Hah! If that's the case, I'd say you're even weaker than I am. And that's why you're here today—isn't it? Because you're too damn weak to do something terrible yourself, so you'd rather recruit a pawn into your harebrained scheme so you can justify it like you always do." Murdock shook his head, each subsequent word dripping with vitriolic disdain. "You're sick, old man. Really sick. And you need _**a lot**_ of help. But I've got my own problems, and I've got no help to offer you, so find it elsewhere. You'll get over it. You're rather familiar with people abandoning those that need their help, after all. And Claire?" Matt turned to stare directly upon the beautiful, Latin angel leaning against the back of the couch. "Claire stays right where she is."

After a moment, Stick sighed acquiescingly, then headed back to the kitchen for another beer. "Fine. She stays. But so am I. At least until I tell you the _**real reason**_ I'm here."

The refrigerator door opened. Murdock leaned over the couch. "Claire, grab your clothes, head into my bedroom in the back. Get dressed. Grab one of my t-shirts and some sweats for me. If…if you wouldn't mind."

Claire nodded in agreement. "You…uh…gonna be OK here?" She nodded in Stick's direction.

Murdock's mouth twitched slightly. "Yeah, it's…I'll…take care of it. Don't worry. The fight's over."

"You couldn't be more wrong about that," Stick said, walking into the kitchen with two, freshly-opened and ice cold beers, one in each hand. He offered one to Matt. "You're going to want to take that for what I'm about to lay on you, kid," he advised. Murdock assented begrudgingly. Claire disappeared with her clothing and the blankets into Matt's bedroom, closing the door behind her. Stick leaned against the couch, took a swig of the beer, then rubbed the soreness on the right side of his jaw. "The fight is far from over," he said grimly. "The reality is the _**real fight**_ is just about to start."

Matt suckled the foam out of the top of the beer bottle then took a gulp. "Stop being so dramatic. It doesn't suit you. Tell me whatever ridiculous, fantastical tale you've concocted this time so I can turn you down and you can get the hell out of my apartment."

Stick's colorless, gray eyes stared directly at Matt's sightless orbs as if the two of them were having a staring contest. "Matthew…have you ever heard of a _**Black Sky**_?"

* * *

 _ **Kamitaira, Toyama Prefecture**_

 _ **Present Day Gokayama District, Nanto, Japan**_

 _ **1662 A.D.**_

As a light snow fell upon the white, thickly-wooded moraines of Edo-period Japan, so too did an eerie hush, a quiet that had caused the old daimyo great distress, interrupting his meditation thrice within the past hour alone. There, praying before the ancient Buddhist shrine in the middle of a dusky copse of creaking birches and onyx pines and wearing nothing but a modest, earth-colored kamishimo, he did not feel the cold, only a slow, creeping dread that the Gods were angry, and that a great calamity was imminent. He felt it like a festering sickness, deep down in his gut. And his gut feelings were scarcely ever wrong. It was his nonpareil intuition that had earned him countless victories over the enemy shoguns of the West, but also the admiration of many within the Tokugawa administration itself, particularly Tokugawa Iemitsu, the very grandson of legendary Tokugawa Ieyasu himself, both of whom were now just memories in a long, bloody and hard-fought saga to unite Japan under a single banner. It was a saga in which the old daimyo had featured prominently, the significance of his deeds and accomplishments not easily forgotten by many.

The Keian Uprising, a ronin rebellion against the now dominant Tokugawa Shogunate, had been savage and bloody, and now that the greater majority of the master-less samurai had been violently dealt with, the greatest threat to the ruling aristocracy was a threat from within. The currently regent, Tokugawa Ietsuna, was young and inexperienced, incapable of untangling the myriad plots being woven together by his closest council of advisors and noble lords, all jockeying for power during the age of prosperity many expected Japan was poised to enter. In the estimation of some of the lords, to consolidate their own power and influence required a complete purge of anything still tied to the tradition of unitary dynastic governance. And the old daimyo who prayed quietly in the snow, at sixty six years old, was now a relic of a bygone era, his legend and influence both simply too great to be ignored by his political opponents. He knew eventually he'd have to face them, the rest of the lords who now served at court, and those precocious upstarts looking to make a name for themselves. Not even wandering out into a dark forest in midwinter could hide him forever.

The old daimyo's closed eyes didn't even flutter as the group of heavily-armored horsemen rode noiselessly into the clearing, their shadows more like smoke than man amidst the midwinter white, forming a semicircle around the lord currently knelt in prayer. Their leader was the last to ride into the clearing, his helmet forged in mimicry of a terrifying demon beast, his obscenely ornate, obsidian armor equally impressive. The stallion he rode was particularly massive and blacker than the mountain sky on a moonless night, its muscular flanks reflected in the gigantic blade of the naginata affixed to the samurai leader's back. He came to a complete stop and said nothing for several moments, white breath clouds forming before the sneering mouth of his helmet. The samurai looked from side to side at his men, then removed his helmet, allowing his long, black hair to tumble down past his shoulders. It was not knotted in the traditional fashion of the samurai. His coal-black eyes were fixed upon the back of the praying daimyo. Procuring a scroll from the satchel at his hip, he unfurled it and began to read in old Japanese.

"Matsudaira Nobutsuna," the samurai said coolly. "By direct decree of Shimazu Mitsuhisa of Clan Shimazu, you are hereby ordered to accompany the retinue of Fuyutsuki Goemon to the capitol city to assist the council in addressing the Ainu unrest and succession disputes in the north and the east. By order of the bakufu officials, you are to accompany us immediately and depart for Edo."

Nobutsuna did not open his eyes, but a slight smirk stretched the thin line of his mouth. "I serve only the shogun of the Tokugawa dynasty; I do not take orders from Shimazu-san."

Two of the horsemen nearest the old daimyo made as though to reach for their weapons, but Goemon quickly held up his hand, gesturing them to relax their battle-ready postures. "I will excuse your insolence due to your ignorance in current matters of state; the shogun delegates orders directly to the daimyo under his command. They, in turn, pass along those orders to the rest of the kingdom. However they see fit."

At last, Matsudaira Nobutsuna stood, sighed, and turned to face the commander of the riders. Though his tightly-stretched, starkly-weathered skin was nearly blue with cold, he didn't look a stitch uncomfortable. He simply folded his arms across his slender chest and tilted his head, popping a muscle in his neck. "Shimazu-san is not a daimyo."

"Shimazu Mitsuhisa has been formally recognized by the shogun as daimyo, and is lord of _Satsuma han_ , governor of Satsuma, Osumi and Hyuga provinces. His authority is absolute, his status unchallenged."

"Let us stop pretending," Nobutsuna smiled softly.

"I'm sorry?"

"You and your warriors do not intend to escort me to Edo," Nobutsuna continued. "You intend to lead me into a thicket somewhere along the way and wound me, leaving me for the wild animals to eat, or you'll drown me in a river while we're crossing, or bash my skull in with a rock while I sleep. Or perhaps a more creative death I haven't yet pondered. So why pretend? Let's just cut all the pretense out of things and get on with it." The old man looked from horseman to horseman. "You're all armored up and ready to strike down one, single, old man whose fingers and toes have frozen. I wouldn't want to disappoint."

A look of annoyance and embarrassment both arrested Fuyutsuki Goemon's face, but he somehow maintained his composure. "I very obviously realize that this is very inconvenient for you, my lord, since you have been technically retired from political and military affairs for quite some time, but your knowledge and expertise in these areas is unchallenged, and your duty is forever to the state, regardless of whether you're living in a governor's palace in the city or out here on a mountain like some twisted old yokai."

Matsudaira Nobutsuna looked from one soldier's face to the next, and to the next. _So these were now the faces of the shogunate, the faces that would define and shape the future of Japan,_ he thought. _They're all pups, barely weaned off their mothers' tits, with experience neither in battle nor in diplomacy. They have no dialogue with the Gods, and hence they cannot understand the soul and thrum of the earth, know her secrets, conduct themselves with the grace and wisdom of the samurai. These men serve no one but themselves; there is no honor in what they do. Only a perversion of_ _ **The Way**_. _If the next age is to be dominated by such men, there can be only despair and ruin._

"Why are you so heavily clad in both plate and steel? Did they tell you it would take many skilled men to send me to my next life?"

Goemon tensed and made a clicking sound with his tongue behind his teeth. "We are your _**personal escort**_ ," he assured the other. "We are with iron and steel so attended for your protection on the voyage to the capitol. Many rogues abound throughout these valleys, and it has been a hard winter, pressing even honest men to loot and steal."

" _ **Honest men**_ ," Nobutsuna smiled and nodded. "Tell me, Fuyutsuki Goemon, _**why**_ is it, exactly, that the shogun has sent for me? Now? When he already has the illustrious council of advisors at his beck and call? What real use can he make of a tired old man?"

"In _**that**_ we are in complete agreement. I asked my master that myself and he simply said that the shogun believes you still have some practical value of some sort that might help him deal with the rising conflict in Hokkaido. Japan cannot be truly unified unless _**all**_ the islands have sworn absolute fealty to the divine lord. The shogun feels you will somehow assist him in doing that."

The old daimyo rubbed his hands together, increasing circulation in his extremities. "And what do you think?"

Fuyutsuki smirked broadly. "Since we're being _**honest,**_ I think you're a hindrance, and your house one of the largest political threats to my clan in the empire. Your untimely demise would greatly destabilize the Matsudaira seat of power and give my house an opportunity to profit greatly, politically and economically."

Nobutsuna spat into the snow at the hooves of Goemon's steed. "You sound just like one of those Dutch white devil whores, the way you talk. You don't care about _**Japan**_ ; all you care about is _**power**_."

At that, Fuyutsuki Goemon whistled, and immediately he along with his four other subordinates slowly dismounted from their horses into the snow, and began to advance forward, hands upon their weapons. They stopped, still holding a semicircle, approximately fifteen feet from where Nobutsuna stood beneath the Buddhist shrine.

The samurai in black returned his helmet to his head. A cloud of hot air formed beyond the demon sneer. "What else is there, in this world?" he asked, his voice distorted behind the mask. "White? Yellow? There are only two types of men in this life, my lord. Men with power—" he removed his spear from his back. "—and men without. I would have thought _**Izu the Wise**_ would at least know that much."

Matsudaira Nobutsuna's hands went to the sash at his waist. From it, he retrieved a previously hidden, long black rope with a sharp, curved hook attached to one end. It gleamed in the moonlight. The soldiers exchanged glances momentarily. Snow fell. Poplars creaked.

Then they came at him, one at a time, in a ballet of flashing blades, piercing screams and clashing steel. The first of the men to reach him was also the youngest, a completely untrained fool, no doubt, and far too eager to distinguish himself. More than likely the nephew of a prominent samurai lord from the capitol who had curried enough favor to get a member of his clan attached to the retinue. The boy died quickly and well, his neck opened up before his sword was ever even in range of his opponent. The second samurai was not far behind, slashing diagonally toward Nobutsuna's right shoulder. A far more experienced and competent fighter, the old daimyo stepped easily aside and allowed the weight of the blade finding nothing but air throw his enemy off balance.

These men wore full suits of armor, which inherently possessed an upside and a downside both. While it would be difficult to wound them with slashing attacks, the very plate that protected them also limited their speed, flexibility and mobility. The old daimyo used this to his advantage, relying on the man's momentum to push him into the third attacker, freeing him up to deal with the fourth. A larger, burlier warrior, the fourth samurai grunt swung his giant club toward Nobutsuna's head. The daimyo arced the rope he was wielding around the hilt of the weapon and yanked it from the surprised guard's hands. This enraged his opponent, causing the man to hurl himself like a starved bear at Matsudaira, ignoring the steel hook that tore through the sinew of his kneecap. Giant, gloved hands crushed down upon the old daimyo's shoulders causing both of them to fall to their knees in the snow. The two of them traded punches and jabs, but in hand-to-hand combat at close range, the bearded goliath was no match for the elder lord. Several teeth were sent tumbling like gambler's dice down the back of the man's throat as several perfectly executed fists connected with the warrior's face. As his enemy fell backward into the snow, he leapt to his feet and pulled the rope free from his quarry just in time to deflect the thrusted katana of the third samurai who was just returning to the fray.

While Nobutsuna easily dispatched the last of Goemon's henchmen, the obsidian-clad samurai leader secretly procured a small, slim vial from his satchel, uncorking it and pouring its contents gently over the blade of his naginata. He tossed the vial into the snow, then spun his blade around swiftly several times before lowering the weapon at his opponent just in time to watch the third samurai collapse into a mass of rended, bloody flesh.

"The reports of your skills were hardly exaggerated," Goemon said. "I'm glad. Have you any idea how long and hard it was a ride to get here and find you? You'd better make this worth it."

A naginata is one of several varieties of traditionally made Japanese blades in the form of a pole weapon, similar to a spear. Naginata were originally used by the samurai class of feudal Japan, as well as by foot soldiers and warrior monks. This one was abnormally long at just over 10 feet in length. The blade was wickedly curved like a sickle, and punctuated by several holes along the back edge into which rings had been inserted. The weapon came at Nobutsuna in a blur, whirring forward behind retracting as quickly as it had come. The old daimyo attempted several times to wrap his rope around the shaft of the spear and wrench it from his enemy's hands, but Fuyutsuki Goemon was far better trained than his fallen comrades, and more troubling was that his style was erratic and nontraditional. Haughty, even.

Nobutsuna somersaulted into the snow, just barely dodging a sinister slice of Goemon's naginata, luring his enemy in for the kill before sending his rope blade darting out from the heaves of frost and clanging noisily off his opponent's helmet, causing a few sparks to fall to the earth. Fuyutsuki howled, staggering backward, giving the daimyo enough time to dart forward, run up the shaft of the spear and send a kick flying directly at Goemon's face. But the man in the iron mask recovered just in time, and released his grip on his own weapon. As Nobutsuna lurched forward, Fuyutsuki's gloved hands closed around the old man's neck, secured him in place before him, and brought the full force of his helmet directly into the daimyo's face.

For several seconds, Matsudaira Nobutsuna saw nothing but stars. Then he felt the cold of snow and ice. But the giant spear blade thrusting into his midsection was far more uncomfortable. The old daimyo wailed in pain as his vision returned, finding Goemon standing directly over him, the black demon face staring directly down upon him as his fists closed around the spear haft, securing it fast in its current position. Nobutsuna clasped his hands around the shaft just above where the blade ended, and tried to pull the weapon free from his body, but it was no use. Fuyutsuki's vantage and strength both were superior.

"To be perfectly honest, I expected more," Goemon rasped. "Though, to be fair, we were neither evenly armored nor were we evenly matched. I, being the vastly superior fighter, should have been the one fighting in rags. Then, just maybe, this might have been something reminiscent of a fair fight." Fuyutsuki knelt down beside the daimyo, removing his helmet while the old man struggled and groaned, blood pooling at the corners of his mouth. "You were right earlier, Matsudaira-san, when you called yourself a tired old man. You're nothing like the legendary warlord who led the shogunal forces to their final victory over the rebellion at Shimabara. You're a has-been who lives out in the woods, cutting timber, fishing streams, and praying to…" He looked above him at the Buddhist shrine and gestured apathetically with one hand. "…to some… _ **nameless**_ God that has long since forsaken these lands. You should have come willingly, Matsudaira Nobutsuna. I would have made it painless for you."

"Go…to hell…" the other choked out, suddenly feeling his body start to tremble, his muscles tense and ache, blood and bile rising in his throat.

"Oh, of that I can be certain I will," Goemon teased. "But not before you, my lord. You see, one of the things my clan is particularly _**famous**_ for, you might say, is our knowledge of salves, tonics, antidotes, _**and poisons**_. Though we would never admit this openly, many of our house have studied ancient Chinese apothecary texts. There are simply _**soooo very many**_ outstanding poisons out there in the world. Take, for example, the poison coating the blade that's stuck into your torso. This one is _**particularly**_ remarkable. It will keep you alive for countless hours—in some cases _**days**_ even, depending upon the dosage—while your _**ki**_ is blocked, somewhere here (he pointed at the back of his spine) at the nape of your neck. It causes all the blood to be rerouted, very, very slowly, back from all your major organs and to that single point. Your muscles are paralyzed, so naturally you can do nothing. Not crawl. Not call for help. Even the muscles in your throat and larynx will be paralyzed. You will slowly feel all the blood in your body route to a single point, and you will bleed out from your mouth, nose, eyes and ears until you have been completely exsanguinated. And, before you ask, you do indeed feel _**everything**_."

Matsudaira's hands fell from the shaft of the naginata and into the snow as he lost his control over his limbs. Already the paralytic agent in the poison was beginning to take effect. Fuyutsuki Goemon smiled broadly.

"You can already feel it, can't you?" the samurai wondered. "I didn't really have the time to properly measure the correct amount, so I simply used the entire vial. It will be excruciatingly painful, but at least it will more than likely end your pathetic, hobbled existence fairly quickly."

Nobutsuna opened his mouth to retort, but the words did not come. Goemon reached down and brushed the old daimyo's stray locks from his face. "Shh, shh, shh, don't try to speak. It's pointless, remember? Here, I'll tell you what. Because you so valiantly dispatched _**all**_ of my men _**and**_ gave me a reason to kill you here and now instead of having to suffer your company on the road for several days before we murdered you and took all your belongings for ourselves, I'll give you a little keepsake to remember me by." Goemon placed his helmet atop Nobutsuna's chest, the twisted oni face with a large cloven gash into the metal staring directly at him. "This demon will usher you out of this life, and another will meet you on the other side."

As Fuyutsuki stood, the old daimyo convulsed and wretched a torrent of vomit and blood out onto the helmet, his chest, and lifeless arms. His eyes were wide and white, frantic and hateful. Goemon left his weapon buried in his fallen enemy, walked back to his horse and mounted the beast. He paused making one final appraisal of the enormous Buddhist shrine in front of which the battle had taken place, and the corpses of his men that lay strewn about. "Deaf Gods and dead men," the samurai said, shaking his head before riding slowly out of the clearing.

Though he could not speak, the words in his head and heart were heavily steeped with malice and disgust. _**This**_ was what the Japan he loved had become. A theater of greedy nobles, distrustful foreigners, godless soldiers and sadistic assassins. He had failed his lord by retiring to Kamitaira during a time when the shogun clearly needed him the most. If his enemy had been right about one singular thing, it was that his duty was ever to the state. To his lord. And his lord was the vessel for the Gods. The very Gods he prayed to. And in failing his lord, so too had he failed his Gods. And this was his penance. A bad, dishonorable death.

As the poison coursed through his veins and blood vessels, his physical world became a world on fire. Every single muscle and tendon in his entire body felt as though it were being stabbed with thousands of smoldering hot needles. He was nearly choking on his own, foul-tasting blood. The cold, icy snow felt as sharp as the blade still protruding from his body. And the demon helmet still remained upon his chest, inches from his own face, staring at him. Smirking.

 _ **No.**_

 _ **No,**_ Matsudaira Nobutsuna thought to himself. _**It can't end here. I can't die here. If the Gods have abandoned me, then perhaps it is the devil I must beseech.**_ His eyes flitted up to the ancient inscriptions upon the Buddhist shrine above him. But his heart was as filled with vitriol as was his body. _**Be damned,**_ he thought seethingly in his mind. _**All of you, be damned. I, Matsudaira Nobutsuna, ruler of the Kawagoe Domain, servant to Tokugawa Iemitsu and retainer of Tokugawa Ieyasu, Izu no Kami, Commander of the shogunate during the Shimabara Rebellions and the Siege of Hara Castle, senior daimyo and overlord of Oshi, call upon whatever demon will hear my cry. Into your hands, I commend my soul; I will ever be your servant, both in this life, and the next, the very instrument of your evil will, if you will grant me the power to kill my enemies, see them driven before me, and restore power to the rightful rulers of the divine realm of Japan."**_

But there was no answer. Snow continued to fall elegantly to the ground, completely disinterested in the petty affairs of men and already fast at work covering the dead bodies of Fuyutsuki's soldiers and the blood pooling out from them as well as their horses that milled about without direction or order. The birch trees swayed, creaking like brittle bone in the frigid wind. The shaking in Matsudaira's body had grown significantly more violent, causing the blade of the spear to repeatedly cut into his burning flesh more and more.

 _ **Fuck you all, then,**_ he thought. _**I shall leave this life bound only to my dreams. In the afterlife I shall find peace.**_

At that very moment, a crow swooped down from one of the snow-covered pines and landed upon the pommel of the naginata. It squawked noisily for several moments. The bird was so black that after a few moments, the outline of it became indistinguishable from the spear itself. The merged silhouette began to ripple slightly and then, just like that, turned into a murky plume of black smoke that rose up into the air and coalesced beside the old daimyo. The dusky shape took the form of a porcelain-skinned woman with long, raven-colored hair cascading down over her face, adorned in a black and silver-gilded kimono and glossy black geta. There were crow feathers around the collar of her kimono, and she was shockingly tall and slender, towering over him at nearly seven feet. Initially, Nobutsuna believed himself to be hallucinating, a side-effect of the Shimazu Clan poison Goemon had neglected to mention. That was until the woman knelt down beside him and brushed aside her long, silky black locks revealing a petrifyingly eye-less face. She held up her hands on either side of her head, revealing a pair of crimson-colored eyes, one in the center of the palm of each hand, staring fixedly down at him. And he heard what he _**thought**_ was a voice, but the terrifying spirit's mouth did not move. He _**felt**_ the voice, or rather, the words _**appeared**_ in his mind.

 _You are either very desperate or very wicked to blaspheme the Old Gods before their house of worship, Matsudaira Nobutsuna,_ the creature told him.

 _If the Gods will not hear my prayers, they can be damned,_ he thought in his mind in response, his jaw clenched shut and frothing with spittle and blood as he replied.

 _Oh, they_ _ **hear**_ _them,_ the monster replied, _but they can do_ _ **nothing**_ _. You see, the Gods and Devils of this world do have power, but not here, in this realm. Sure enough, you will know their power in the afterlife, but here on earth, the only_ _ **real power**_ _is wielded by those who_ _ **walk between the worlds of Gods and men**_.

 _I don't understand what you mean. Who are you? Are you a demon?_

The eyes in the palms of the woman's hands gleamed brightly in the darkness. _I am one of those who_ _ **walks between**_ _worlds,_ the creature told him. _I am neither God nor mortal, yet I was already old when the world was young. I was then as I shall always be; time is a mortal illusion, and the loom will ever weave the same threads again and again and again._

A single world formed in Nobutsuna's mind. He realized suddenly that the snow that had been falling around them now hung in the air, frozen in place. Something smelled vaguely of sulfur and burning pine. _**Yokai**_ , he thought.

The thin lips of the tall woman cracked into a smile. _Your kind has given me many names throughout the centuries. Taka-onna, Tenome, The Sightless Death, Shepherd of Revenge… but_ _ **yokai,**_ _for some reason, always conjures the most_ _ **fear**_ _and_ _ **terror**_ _. Do not think me some twisted night spirit, Matsudaira Nobutsuna; I am a conduit for a power far greater than my own. I too serve a master, and it was that master that has sent me to you. My master_ _ **did**_ _hear your begging and pleading, and I have come to answer that call._

Even as paralyzed as he was, the old daimyo felt a soul-rending chill tumble down his burning spine. He had called out to the demons, and one had answered. He had spent his entire life praying to and worshipping the Old Gods, a beacon of justice, virtue, tradition and honor. A loyal servant of the shogun and his court, he had observed _**bushido**_ to the very letter every single day of his life. And now, as he lay dying, poison searing through every vein in his body, he found himself making pacts with demons. Sometimes, Nobutsuna wondered, it is the devil himself that turns out to be your greatest ally. The old daimyo reminded himself that his intentions were noble.

 _Will you…will you_ _ **spare my life**_ _if I serve you? Will your master meet my conditions for pledging my soul to his host?_

The creature craned her long, bony neck lower. Nobutsuna felt the icy cold of her long, silky hair brush across his neck and shoulders. Those crimson red eyes glared at him fixedly. He knew they could see straight through him; false bravado, bartering, negotiation and lying would be utterly useless here.

 _You will not serve_ _ **The Master**_ _in life, but in death. In death, you will find new life. You will be reborn as a vessel for a great power, a power that will allow you to accomplish far more than something as petty and mortal as taking revenge upon other men. You will become an agent in one of the oldest and most important cabals in the history of human civilization—_ _ **the Hand**_ **—** _a shadow group that has influenced and guided the affairs of men for over a thousand years, a group that must protect that which matters most from the clutches of great evils that exist beyond this realm. Most importantly, you will become a guardian for the greatest weapon that exists on this earthly plane._

Nobutsuna began to feel the life sleeping away from him. He could no longer feel his hands, fingers, toes or legs. The tightness in his gut and spasms in his neck, back and torso had grown less violent. _What weapon?_

 _The only thing on earth that can permanently destroy a God,_ the spirit whispered, its voice like dry leaves scraping across old stone. _The_ _ **Black Sky**_ _. It has existed for countless centuries, and even we don't truly know where it came from. Many think it was the remainder of an uneven sum of creative power when the Gods shaped the world, and that they simply left it behind or didn't bother to eliminate it. Regardless, the_ _ **Black Sky**_ _must be found and protected. Those who control_ _ **Black Sky**_ _control the fate of this realm, and cannot be stopped by any natural or supernatural power. It is the destiny of the_ _ **Hand**_ _to control and wield this power._

 _And, you want me to..._ he coughed and sputtered… _find this weapon for you?_

The demon creature smirked broadly, its eyes seemingly filled with some sort of otherworldly delight. _No, Matsudaira Nobutsuna. We have already found the_ _ **Black Sky.**_

 _Then…then why do you need_ _ **my**_ _help?_

 _Because we need you to_ _ **kill him**_ _. To kill the_ _ **Black Sky**_ _._

The old daimyo paused with wonder. He had begun to feel the creeping embrace of doubt. If this "Black Sky" this yokai was speaking of was so powerful, how could he, a sixty-six year old retired samurai, possibly be the one to eliminate it, especially if it had the power to kill a God.

 _I can smell your doubt, human. I would be greatly concerned if you had no reservations. You see, the_ _ **Black Sky**_ _is not a sword. It is not a weapon. It is not made of steel, or iron, or glass. The_ _ **Black Sky**_ _is a power that exists_ _ **within**_ _a living person. More often than not, that person does not realize they possess that power, and live their lives completely unaware of what dwells within their soul. Sometimes, the_ _ **Hand**_ _will be able to find that person and convince them to join us. Other times, they are more stubborn and refuse. It matters not. Though the vessel for the power of the_ _ **Black Sky**_ _may die, the power itself is immortal and will live on, reborn into the soul of another chosen by the force itself. If a_ _ **Black Sky**_ _does not cooperate with my Master and his purpose, he will be slain, and when he is reborn, we will find them and try again._

It was Nobutsuna's turn to smile. _And you want_ _ **me**_ _to kill this_ _ **Black Sky**_ _because he won't work alongside your clan._

 _In life, you were a great warrior, general, leader, statesman and tactician._ Those bright crimson eyes bore down upon him with great interest. _And given the circumstances, I'd say you're the perfect choice for the job._

 _And why is that?_ Matsudaira Nobutsuna asked, even though right then and there he already knew what his answer was going to be. And he knew the yokai knew it too. Which is why the creature took great pleasure when it answered him.

 _Because the_ _ **Black Sky**_ _we want you to kill just poisoned you and rode out of this clearing,_ said the spirit. _We get what we want, you get revenge. Everybody wins. Enough talk now! Will you become an agent of The Hand? Will you serve my Master unquestioningly until whatever end, and swear your soul to his host? What say you, Matsudaira Nobutsuna?_

There was no point in delaying the inevitable any further. The old daimyo barely managed a nod. _Yes,_ he thought. _I will serve you._ _By the honor of the samurai, I will serve you until whatever end._

The tall woman gave an ethereal laugh before dissipating into a puff of black smoke from which a multitude of large black crows emerged and flew up and out of the clearing. Nobutsuna continued to lie in the snow, staring upward at the flakes of snow frozen in time all around him. He could feel nothing at all now. His vision was starting to dim.

 _Restore honor…to Japan…_ he thought to himself, the very last thought that flashed through his head before a brilliant red flashed through his eyes, causing them to momentarily turn from brown to crimson. Then the red faded slowly, and Matsudaira Nobutsuna died, in a snowy clearing in the mountains of Kamitaira _ **.**_ But death, he would soon discover, was as much a beginning as it was an end.

* * *

"You realize, of course, how utterly ridiculous this entire story sounds, from start to finish, don't you, Stick?" Matt asked. He finished dressing just in time to accept a hot mug of freshly-brewed coffee from Claire.

"I've got to head over to the hospital," she said before giving him a soft peck on the cheek. "Call me later?"

"It's a promise," Murdock replied, _watching_ Claire leave his apartment, awkwardly weaving around Stick as she left.

As soon as the apartment door closed, he walked into the kitchen and leaned against the island. "Television: on," he said. The mounted LED television in the wall of the kitchen flickered to life, preset to ABC New York news. "I'm not doing it. Whatever it is you want me to do, go after this _**Black Sky**_ person _—_ I won't do it. The last time you talked about stuff like this, you killed a small boy. I've listened to your crazy Japanese folktale about ancient warlords and demon ghosts, now I want you to get the hell out of my apartment. You and I are **done** , Stick. Don't you get it? _**Finished**_. You abandoned me once, and I won't let you do it again. Now get out of my house, and get out of my life."

"Matt, you won't **have** an apartment or a life if you don't help me with this, don't you see? This entire city is under siege by incredibly powerful—"

"Then it's a good thing they have you to protect them, isn't it?" Murdock shot back with a snarky tone.

Stick shook his head. "Matt, this is no laughing matter."

"You're right, Stick. It isn't a laughing matter when you treat a young boy like a son and then throw him to the wolves just because you're socially uncomfortable nourishing a real human bond."

"Matt, I know you're still sore over that, but one day you will understand, I promise you. What I did I did with good reason, and if I hadn't, you'd very well be dead already. It's a fucked up world, Matty, and sometimes you have to make the hard choice. Choices you don't like making but have to, and you've got to live with those choices anyway. I came here because you, Matt, are a better man than I am. And I need a better man to be able to do the job that needs to be done."

"Well you need to work on your sales pitch," Matt snorted.

"You were **never** a son to me, Matthew," Stick said, finishing his beer. "But you were a friend. An ally. And I never once second-guessed choosing to train you. I was just discouraged that you never realized your full potential. I'm giving you an opportunity to do that. Here. Now."

Matt Murdock held his hand up, entreating Stick to be silent. His ears perked up at the news report playing on the television.

"…after a lone gunman, believed to be responsible for a series of attacks in Hell's Kitchen over the past 48 hours, was finally apprehended by New York City police after he collapsed in a pharmacy, attempting to coerce employees at the store to force him into cardiac arrest. Information on both the attacks and the man behind them are still spotty as much of the details surrounding both incidents has been kept tightly under wraps by the joint NYPD-FBI task force. The gunman is currently being held downtown…"

Matt put the coffee down, motoring into action before the news anchor had even finished the story.

"Now where you are going?" Stick asked Murdock.

"Downtown," Matt said, padding across the apartment and heading for the bedroom. "I'm actually a lawyer sometimes, Stick," Murdock reminded the other. "I actually go to work like a normal person, from time to time."

Stick focused his hearing on the television. "What, you're involved in this thing with the Rooftop Sniper, or whatever they're calling this nutcase?"

"I punched him off a roof the other night," Matt said, returning from the bedroom a moment later with a large black duffel bag slung over his shoulder. He fixed his rectangular red glasses to his face. "I'd say, at the very least, I owe him a short visit. And I'd like you to be out of my apartment by the time I get back. There's…there's leftover Chinese in the refrigerator if you're hungry before you hit the road."

"Fine, I'll just have to find somebody else to help me deal with the evil infesting this city," Stick sighed. "Somebody better than you. Somebody willing to go all the way and get the job done."

"Great. Good luck with your search," Murdock quipped on his way back. "The crazy classifieds seem to be overflowing with nut-jobs and wannabe vigilantes these days."

"And I wonder why that could possibly be," Stick replied sarcastically.

"Goodbye, Stick," Matt said, then left the apartment, slamming the door closed behind him on what he thought was an open and shut case. The old man was rattled, desperate, and looking for company on his senile escapades again. His claims that the warrior Nobu Yoshioka, who he'd fought and killed down at Pier 81, was hundreds of years old and a reincarnated samurai were clearly ludicrous. But it _**was**_ patently obvious that there was a cabal of crimson ninjas operating here in New York City, and he'd been as of yet completely unable to explain why. He'd do his own investigation, independent of Stick, of course, but for now, he had to focus on the man that had nearly killed Foggy and Karen. He had to find out why, and who put him up to it. Lives hung in the balance. Every second counted. But for the moment, he'd have to do battle with a ball-point pen, not eskrima sticks.


End file.
